A few days ago I was browsing the online sites of Madrid theaters when on one of them I found this sentence: “If you are JOB “You can benefit from preferential rates. » JOB? Will I be a JOBwill come J. of retired? I tried to click JOBwithout success, and I had to ask the search engine what it was about JOB.
“The jobo, as it is commonly called in the Dominican Republic, is a fruit related to the plum family,” Wikipedia told me. But no, it couldn’t be that a theater had special prices for plums. And what’s more, this job was in lower case… And suddenly: “JOBO is the cultural bonus that Madrid City Hall 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 the way to becoming the century of acronyms of everything. Especially in public administrations, which have become a powerful machine and factory for creating neolexic based, most of the time, on the acronyms or acronyms with which they name their departments, sections, services or products.
There would be nothing objectionable or reprehensible about this – language is a living being, it is constantly evolving and in turmoil, it is in constant turmoil – if it were only at the other end of the cycle of the message, to that of the recipient, just like citizens, generally do not know the new terms and the information does not reach where it should go. We have once again encountered the gibberish monster of administrative language!
For a few years now – and the Manifesto for clear language in administration released in January 2022 by the magazine Archilettersthat 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 is organizing the II International Congress on Clear Communication. Perhaps we should ask each public administration in forums like this to have a sheet 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 JOB ―cultural bonus for young people― Madrid City Hall could also have created a JUBO ―cultural bonus for retirees―. But no, I only found in search engines that “the jubo is a venomous snake from the boa family, very common in Cuba”.
