Corporate jargon skews reality in the legal profession

This article from The Guardian observes that the legal industry’s love of corporate jargon Last week, for example, DLA Piper heralded a fresh round of redundancies by announcing that the firm would be doing "right-sizing". Reality-skewing terms like "risk management" (gambling),"adding value" (giving things away for free) and taking a "solution-focused approach" (cutting corners) were particularly popular in the period of economic expansion between 2001-2007 , while the flavour of the moment is the recession-era phrase: "going forward". "The great enemy of clear language is insincerity," wrote George Orwell in his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language. "When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink."

Corporate jargon skews reality in the legal profession guardian.co.uk Fri, Nov 26, 2010