jargonauts

If I have a wish for the coming week, it's that fewer people will use unpleasant words, and nasty strings of them, in my presence. Sometimes I think about leaving human company behind to live among creatures who communicate in quiet whirrs and beeps, with a note of fragrance underneath.

Once, before my voice had broken properly, I admit that I picked up all the music papers specifically to read about cowering shards of inevitability this and a deliquescent intimation of mortality that. Long words all pressed up together made my heart beat a little faster, but now I prefer miserly writers who really ration the syllables. Henry Green and Muriel Spark are amazing like that. Will Self and Jonathan Meades are not.

But it's the jargon that's getting me down. Last week everything was robust. We've got a robust plan, that seems like a robust strategy, and I thought you gave a robust defence of your views. And still with the sourcing, everywhere. When did people start sourcing things anyway? What's the difference between local ingredients and locally-sourced ingredients? Part of me wants to carry a huge gong everywhere for highlighting the bad words, but most of me knows I must accept the bloat and move on.

Across the piece - this is big with my colleagues at the moment. First it was just politicians on the Today programme, but now everyone's promising to carry out new ideas across the piece, and sometimes across the piste. I think it means really well, but I don't know for sure. Two people from nPower came to the door on Friday to make me change supplier and it was mostly quite nice, quite soporific, with the woman saying, "What it is, it's really simple," over and over, and pointing at a book of extremely complex flow charts with questions inside diamonds and rectangles about my energy consumption. But then she said, "What it is, it's really simple - we can save you money on your electric across the piece," and that's fuckery, to borrow Ms Winehouse's nice new word.