Drowning in words? by Letitia Mason

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Once upon a time, a long time ago, before I retired from paid work, I was in the part of the civil service that deals with further education. I sat in interminable meetings about how to raise standards, particularly for adults who had missed out on schooling, or had special needs.

Occasionally the proceedings were enlightening, but more often they were an exercise in staying afloat in a soup of ‘TLAs’, three letter acronyms. We were good at these and phrases would wash over me:

  • KSA key skills attainment
  • BLM base level monitoring
  • BMR bench marked results

Acronym soup
Some people were adept at speaking this language and would set out an argument comprising four syllable words and acronyms at the end of which I would wonder ‘Was there any content in that or was it was a series of letters strung together?’ Colleagues would usually agree with the speaker, or make an additional long winded comment. At the end of two hours very little progress had been made and people would sigh over the difficulties of advancing such a complex project.
Fast forward 4 years and I am struggling to write a description of traffic entering the port of Calais, watched by migrants eager to cross to the UK. A torrent of words streams into my head – lorries thundering past, the roar of traffic, the hiss of wheels on the wet road. These are all short-hand phrases like the TLAs.  They convey meaning, but not sense. They do not explain how those particular people experience the traffic on that particular day, or what their perception of their situation is. 
Jesus never spoke in clichés.  He either quoted directly from scripture or said something original and unexpected. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kind of heaven.’ This statement is counter cultural in any language.
We are rich in words in this country.  We have a mighty legacy of Chaucer,  Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Virginia Woolf, CS Lewis, Man Booker prize winner Anna Burns. Our language has absorbed words from countless other tongues and has changed and adapted over the centuries. New words evolve but we do not necessarily understand what they mean. Anyone for Brexit?
This is my last ACW blog, Liz Manning is taking over this slot. May God give her, and you, good words.




Letitia Mason fell in love with East and Central Africa while teaching at a harambee school in Kenya. She has published Lost Children of Cush, a novel of South Sudan. Tish works for Flame International and lives in Surrey with her husband and a crazy dog.   @TishMason1




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