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Working in a copywriting agency and dealing with words from a variety of sources every day means you soon spot emerging (or fully emerged) trends in vocabulary and word use.

A couple of years ago it was ‘raft’, as in ‘a raft of changes’ or ‘a raft of measures’. You couldn’t turn on the news or open the paper without a politician or some sort of consultant (both are invariably among the prime culprits for this sort of thing) talking about ‘a raft’ of steps being taken, or ‘a raft’ of proposals being considered. What’s the matter with ’a series’ or ‘a number’ or just ‘various’? And how did ’a raft’ became a synonym for ‘a series’ anyway?

But that’s not the reason for this post.  No. The thing that has had us quietly bristling in the office is another example of one of these verbal trends – ‘unmet needs’. As in, ‘a number of new services are being planned to respond to the unmet needs of local patients’. Or, ‘we are proactively seeking to address the unmet needs of our customers.’

But surely, by definition all needs are unmet? That is precisely what need means. If the needs  been met, they would no longer be needs. There is absolutely no need to qualify the word need with the word unmet. It doesn’t make it sound more serious or more important. So please don’t do it.

Tuborg and bacon sandwiches all round this month – we’ve just been commissioned by Vestas Wind Systems, the largest wind energy company in the world (and a Danish one, in case you didn’t get the subtle link), to provide the copy for a series of  country websites and product brochures.

Ties in quite nicely actually, because we’ve just finished writing a wind energy brochure for the Northwest Regional Development Agency.

We are fast becoming the windiest copywriting agency in the country.

With a general election on the horizon, will politicians finally get the message that clarity trumps jargon every time?

Last year, the Local Government Association (LGA) issued a list of the 100 most over-used buzzwords, including such gems as “step change”, “holistic” “sustainable” and “synergies”, and asked local councils to stop using them.

LGA chairman Sir Simon Milton said that if councils did not explain things in proper English, “local people will fail to understand its relevance to them or why they should to turn out and vote. Unless information is given to people to explain why their council matters, then local democracy will be threatened with extinction.”

Extinction may be pushing it, but certainly, talking to people in clear, plain English instead of hiding behind buzzwords, jargon and bluster might help retain people’s interest, rather than turning them off politics at both the national and local level.

What is it with the word ‘access’ all of a sudden?

You can’t move these days without people ‘accessing’ education, ‘accessing’ information on the web, ‘accessing’ resources in the library, or ‘accessing’ lists of annoying words.

Whatever happened to good old entering, obtaining, getting, using, reading, or any other of the hundreds or perfectly good verbs? Verbs that actually convey something specific about the action being carried. Verbs that suggest a sense of movement, of deliberate choice, that people are actually doing something, rather than access, which to my mind is a vague, passive word and should be avoided at all costs.

Unless of course it is being used in its correct sense (according to Collins, ‘the act of entering or approaching’), which it very rarely is.