Three cheers for Great Britain's Local Government Association, which sent round a memo to officials and officious bureaucrats to ditch their doublespeak and eschew buzzwords.

Seeing as how we at Hammock are in the business of trying to improve communication between our clients and the rest of the world, I can only shake my head in wonder at this example of "impenetrable jargon": "Why do we have to have 'coterminous, stakeholder engagement' when we could just 'talk to people' instead?" he said.

The list includes some real headscratchers - one wonders how much productive time was lost coming up with some of them.

Several words and phrases that set my teeth a-grind made the list (where present, words in parentheses were suggested as more sensible phrasings):
Best practices (best way)
Bottom-up (listening to people)
Customer (people or person)
Engagement/Engaging (working with people/getting people involved)
Level playing field
Transparency (clear)

Others that didn't make the list - perhaps they aren't used in England? - that I would have included are "corporate/organizational DNA; green, which may have set a record for the speed at which it has become meaningless; conversational media, which too often resembles a shouting match in a late-night bar; and COB - with today's technology, when does a business ever close?

I'm sure you have your own list of buzzwords and clichés and hackneyed phrases. Send 'em along and I will keep a list in which we can all be community stakeholders.