JARGON OF THE WEEK: **Pathfinder**

Submitted by Victor on

Promoting the use of clear language among children’s rights advocates 

Contrary to first impressions you don’t need a compass or map-reading skills to be a pathfinder in the advocacy world. All you need are good ideas and will to follow these through. 

The meaning of pathfinder is as literal as meanings can get - a person who finds or shows others a path. But nowadays the word is being used in the figurative sense to describe either individuals who or organisations and States which take the lead on a particular issue. And it’s in this figurative use of the word that language becomes idealistic.

Luckily, those behind the bid to romanticise human rights language stopped at pathfinder - imagine calling a State a torch-bearer or guiding light.

Nonetheless, romanticism is the domain of novelists, not report writers, whose role it is to describe things plainly and for what they are, e.g. an organisation leading on the issue of XXX, or a pioneering advocate.   

Organisation: 
Child Rights International Network

Countries

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