"...Playing among the ruined languages,    
So small beside their large confusing words..."

W.H. Auden

French playwright Eugene Ionesco's first work, The Bald Soprano, was inspired by his attempt to learn English from Berlitz courses and tour guides. Classic theatre of the absurd, Ionesco's play is about communication's dependency on words.

The play begins with normal english, but one by one, inappropriate words get inserted and by the time the curtain falls, the confused players are pacing about screaming non-sequitors at each other. They're yelling the same language, but the inappropriate words have no context and thus the script is reduced to cacophony. Journalism today shares much with Ionesco's play.

Nor is this English 101. Our concern is for words that impede and obfuscate articulation. We're so careless with words and reckless with syntax, that what we have here is a failure to communicate.

Even William F. Buckley, Jr.'s usage can't always be trusted. A recent National Review cover used the redundant term "they've got..."! This awful phrase is listed as slang in the new Webster's Unabridged Dictionary, example number 64, the last choice of usage for the past participle of get. Buckley must know "they have" would be proper and less glottal.

Disingenuous is an example from the plethora of fad words with which our mother tongue grows turgid. It's a fine word unless disingenuously used. But when words are hot, they're hot and shibboleths infect today's journalism like pathogens carried by Typhoid Mary computers in some electropic epidemic. Writers litter their copy with the five classes of words they should avoid like the above mentioned plague. These are euphemisms, jargon, clichés, status words and thesauramorphs.

Euphemisms are the worst, for they are the antithesis of communication. Euphemisms are seducing and deceiving words, the tools of politicians, social engineers, con artists and other criminal types. They're employed to disguise the truth and promulgate lies. They're used to put "spin" on a story or idea and are downright poisonous to society.

Calling gambling gaming may serve casinos and their sycophants in the press and legislatures, but gamblers aren't playing games for fun any more than alcoholics drink because they're thirsty. Chess and checkers are games; gambling is big business like tobacco, alcohol, drugs and prostitution and just as dependant on human addictions. The gaming euphemism only seeks to cloak gambling's destructive vice.

No one gets laid off anymore, they're downsized. Do small people work for less? We don't fire people, we "...rationalize our human resource base". The seal pups in Canada aren't slaughtered or killed. They're harvested, like a corn crop. We far prefer growth to overpopulation. The euphemism softens the sound, but not the effects, of a perpetually pregnant problem. The more "politically correct" the euphemism and its employer, the less it can be trusted.

Jargon has a place in technical manuals, but jargon and its poor relative, slang, show up where they shouldn't. Jargon is code language, used to make writers appear adept. It may be misunderstood, even by initiates and quickly becomes cliché. Both sides of the environmental debate, for instance, use arguments shot through with scientific jargon even though the public, whom they seek to influence, doesn't know the code. Unavoidable jargon must be defined. Acronyms are just shorthand jargon.

Legal jargon is the worst of all and is designed to mislead and/or protect reporters from the unguiculate grasp of lawyers. The most fashionably misused examples are allege and allegation. Reporters should consult dictionaries and brave up to subpoena rattling shysters.

To allege is to assert without proof. An allegation is an unfounded charge, yet to be proven. A murder or other illegal act witnessed by police or reliable witnesses is not an allegation, it's a fact. A corpse is not allegedly dead, just dead. Evidenced gathered and presented by authorities as proof removes the need to write alleged or allegation. Our presumptions of innocence on the part of criminals can be carried just so far.

Clichés can be perennial or current. Of the former little needs be said. We all know the tired old state-of-the-art, bottom line and run-of-the-mill clichés. Most writers, (except those in advertising and marketing), manage to avoid the most egregious perennial clichés, only to succumb to the more current variety.

Nothing effects or influences anymore, it impacts it, like a bullet, or meteor from space. Computers aren't just manageable, they're user-friendly. Politicians aren't elected, they're given a mandate. Look up venue and you'll quit using it to mean location unless you're a lawyer.

Laws, rules and regulations aren't harsh, severe or repressive, no sir. They're draconian! This word is everywhere now, never mind that wicked King Draco is dead these 2,700 years. As used today, the word applies to any measure proposed by an opposing political party.

People don't just talk anymore; they have to interact or dialogue. Agencies don't co-operate, they interface. Jargon, purloined from psycho-babble or conscripted from computerese, quickly becomes cliché. The more it's imitated, the faster it tires and tired language bores readers.

As do status symbol words, intended to impress readers with the writer's superior intellect and lexicon. Good ones are difficult to spell and pronounce; call them esoteric jargon. We're talking serious words here.

Synergism, syllogism, symbioses. Words like these keep the riff-raff out of our audience. Paradigm, recidivism, infrastructure. "High dollar" words, Molly Ivins calls them. We might even deploy smart bombs like cognition, angst or Zeitgeist. The more arcane the better, when you practice to impress. And be sure to use facilitate, perhaps the only fad word so overused as proactive.

"A generation ago, only sissies and bureaucrats would have said 'facilitate' in public," wrote Russell Baker in his essay on fad language. Today, nobody helps, assists or enables. They're busy facilitating. It's the facile thing to do.

Finally, there are the dreaded thesauramorphs, exhumed while pawing a thesaurus for the least likely word. Selected in desperation, these frequently fatuous festoonings just decorate dull and uninspired writing. And don't bother looking up thesauramorph; I made it up.

Like everything, language changes over time. Even pretentious neologisms like proactive sometimes make it into dictionaries, although just plain active serves better. Most of us are in favor of activity. But all change isn't progress and as communication is the very cause of culture and culture is the cement of society, lexicographers do us no favors by admitting every redundant neologism spawned by some pretentious politician or buffoonish bureaucrat.

Nor should editors and publishers accept incorrect grammar, confused syntax or a lack of any discernible style to accommodate deadlines, the need for advertising space or the edicts of the comptroller. Our very language is at stake.