LancesWorld.com Journal

According to a CNN.com report I saw this morning, officials at Tunbridge Wells council in southern England felt that the term "brainstorming" might offend people with epilepsy, a condition that involves periodic electrical storms inside the brain. As such, the Town Council decided that all representatives should use the term "thought showers" instead.

Really?

Apparently, the British Government decided to take a closer look at the words the government and its councils use from day to day. The result? A list of 100 banned words was released by the Local Government Association (LGA) in the UK.

I did a little digging and discovered that, while most major media are reporting that this list was released just this past Friday, it was actually first released on December 11, 2007: not just this past Friday. The list was released for "National Plain English Day," one of Britain's finer additions to the calendar, I'm convinced.

The word "brainstorm," by the way, is not on the list of banned words. In addition to providing the words, the LGA also included suggestions for alternative choices to these buzzwords. One of my favorites is their suggestion to replace "coterminosity" with "all singing from the same hymn sheet."

For those of you interested in seeing the entire list, I am making it available to you here.