I was browsing a few days ago on online sites for Madrid theaters when in one of them I found this phrase: “If you are JOBO “You can benefit from special rates.” JOB? Will I be a JOBOwill come J. of retired? I tried to click on JOBOwithout success, and I had to ask the search engine what that was about JOBO.
“The jobo, as it is commonly called in the Dominican Republic, is a fruit that is related to the plum family,” Wikipedia answered me. But no, it couldn’t be that a theater had special rates for plums. And also this job was in lowercase letters… And suddenly: “JOBO is the cultural bonus that the Madrid City Council has created to bring culture closer to the youngest.” Let’s finish! Other lexicalized acronyms.
We already commented here a few months ago that if the 20th was called the century of acronyms, the 21st is on its way to becoming the century of acronyms for everything. Especially in Public Administrations, which have become a powerful machine and factory for creating neolexicon based, most of the time, on the acronyms or acronyms with which they name their departments, sections, services or products.
There would be nothing criticizable or objectionable about this – language is a living being, it is constantly evolving and boiling, it is constantly boiling – if it were not for the fact that at the other end of the cycle of the message, at that of the receiver, at that of Citizens generally do not know the new terms, and the information does not reach where it should go. We have encountered the Gibberish Monster of administrative language again!
For a few years now – and the Manifesto for Clear Language in Administration released in January 2022 by the magazine Archiletterswhich I direct, clear language and communication are on the rise among academics, administrations, institutions, the press and experts in language and communication. This same week, for example, the Rey Juan Carlos University organizes the II International Congress on Clear Communication. Perhaps we should ask each public administration in forums like this to have a record permanently updated and available online with all its neolexicon, whether or not it comes from acronyms or acronyms. A jungle of new signals cannot be created for citizens without giving them decoding tools.
I thought, I don’t really know why, that since I had a JOBO ―cultural bonus for young people― the Madrid City Council might also have created a JUBO ―cultural bonus for retirees―. But no, I have only found in search engines that “jubo is a poisonous snake from the boa family, very common in Cuba.”
#administration #neolexicon #factory
