The week has ended on a low note for anyone who cares about the fate of specialised cinema in the UK, with the news that Tartan Films has gone into administration. Details are sketchy, as no official announcement has been made, but Tartan looks to be the latest independent British company to suffer as a result of chronic under-capitalisation.
Today the government announced it is taking further action to tackle age discrimination and pay inequality between men and women. I'm not going to debate the merits or otherwise of Harriet Harman's proposals here, but needless to say some kind of action is long overdue in the film production sector, which has struggled to become more diverse and fairer despite a very welcome public pledge by industry leaders.
It’s heartening to see The Guardian film blog crackling with debate about the poor showing of European films at the UK box office. It’s high time the issue was aired outside the usual circle of agencies involved in public film policy and specialist journals like Sight & Sound.
A news story that was doing the rounds at the tail end of 2007 has recently resurfaced (see Guardian.co.uk and Telegraph.co.uk). Ever mindful of the common man (or non-gender specific person), the Local Government Association has declared war on jargon, issuing a list of words to be banned from the Local Authority lexicon.
Fair enough, you may say. Language should help ease the passage to understanding not block the way like an impenetrable thicket. And scanning down the list of proscribed terms (or ‘non-words’ to use the LGA’s own jargon) one can readily sympathise: so out with ‘predictors of beaconicity’ and shame on ‘coterminosity’! Yah boo sucks to ‘Performance network’ and a big fat raspberry to ‘improvement levers’.
But before the literary lynch mob gets too carried away we should remember there is a difference between buzz words (empty neologisms) and technical terms.
Continue reading "In defence of jargon…used appropriately." »