ANYTHING strike you as odd about the following? A council spokesman said: “We are currently meeting with representatives of the Highways Agency with the aim of mitigating the impact of voids presently existing in our road infrastructure, due to the recent unusually extreme weather.

“In the meantime we intend to temporarily grow our own highways department on the human resources side to deal with the challenges posed by weather-related depreciation, and to trial a project to facilitate road-users in accessing information to prevent them from journeying in the direction of routes affected by voids in the carriageway.”

If you find nothing at all unusual about those two sentences, which I just made up, then you probably shouldn’t read any more of this article. Or perhaps you should, but prepare to be “challenged”.

Columnists waxing wrathful about attacks on our beloved language are, I know, not that unusual. But, emboldened by writing for a publication which recently won a Plain English Campaign award for “crystal clear reporting”, I feel I must fight back against the monstrous regiment of jargon-mongers and its incessant efforts to subvert our mother tongue.

It’s not just the use of needlessly complex sentences or the descent into downright gobbledegook; there seems to be an ongoing effort to corrupt our way of speech by inventing whole new “languages” and attempting, by constant repetition and browbeating, to give them a universality and legitimacy they absolutely do not deserve.

Before exploring this further, let’s have a look at how my, admittedly grossly exaggerated, “council statement” could have looked in straightforward English. A council spokesman said: “We are meeting the Highways Agency to discuss repairing the many holes in our roads caused by the recent bad weather. We will also temporarily increase our staff to speed up the repairs, and test a new warning system to prevent motorists travelling towards the areas affected by the work.”

This doesn’t just cut out a load of superfluous verbiage; it also eliminates a number of more insidious intruders. Since when was it necessary to “meet with” someone, when the word “meet” covers exactly the same ground on its own?

And what is a “void” in the road, other than a good, old-fashioned “hole”? Yet more than one warning of road closures due to “voids” has reached The Press recently. Don’t the powers-that-be want to admit there are holes in our roads?

The latter is an example of “council-speak”, one of the many new “languages” being foisted on us with varying degrees of subtlety. Having written about other aspects of the law last week, I won’t dwell on the vagaries of “police-speak”, or the mixture of arcane phraseology and infuriating jargon that pervades the legal profession.

Instead, let me turn to “business-speak”; here we find the verb “to grow” used in a whole range of inappropriate ways, replacing such legitimate words as “increase” or “build up”, as in “we have grown our workforce” or “we intend to grow our finances for the coming year”.

At least it’s fairly obvious what “grow” means in these contexts; many statements emanating from large businesses make virtually no sense at all to the uninitiated. Why do people do this? It’s partly about exclusivity and maintaining professional mystique; dressing up relatively straightforward concepts in impenetrable language bamboozles outsiders and makes insiders seem cleverer than they are.

Exclusivity seems at odds with the attempts by some to impose jargon on in the rest of us, but I believe that’s usually more about obscuring meaning and keeping outsiders at a disadvantage than sharing the joys of the new vocabulary. The rest of us must not fall for this linguistic bullying. We must seize the grammatical high ground, force the gobbledegook merchants to repeat everything in proper English – if they can – and tell them plainly what they can do with all their pointless new words and phrases. Maybe they could use them to fill some of those voids in the road.