Lingo Gingo

Do you think climate change is attracting too much jargon?

I wonder about this, because years ago I was a senior programmer in a software firm who created online retail systems for supermarkets, and we had a language of our own.  Not just a language other programmers in other companies could understand.  No.  Not just a language other programmers in our own company could understand.  No they couldn’t.  Even people who produced other versions of retail systems in the same company would not understand the acronyms and specialist terms we had conjured up in producing this new system.

ISS400.  OSIF.  TAC.  COREMA.  MS. IA. SP. HSI…listening in during our Christmas party must have been like being a fly on the wall in Bletchley Park during the second world war.  Very excluding.

And now I am wondering whether climate change is distancing some people – in particular, owners of small businesses, purely because there is so much jargon.  And people in the know are starting to forget to explain some terms before they launch into full “TLA” lingo.

(Three Letter Acronym, by the way.  But you already knew that, right?)

PV?  EUETS? Mitigation? Adaptation?  GHG?  UKCIP?  CCC? CCPO? DECC? MtCO2e?  CCA? JI? CDM? 

My goodness, it is the ICL retail systems ISS400 project all over again!

OK, so you and I know what these terms mean (don’t we?) but how about people we are trying to engage with?  Jargon excludes and frightens people off. 

Let’s all commit to explain our climate change acronyms every time we speak to groups who are not likely to know their meaning.  It’s not clever to show you know more than the audience, and can be counter productive.