In Alexandra township outside Johannesburg, I was interviewing 26-year-old Rosinah about her youngest brother, Vuyani, for a story that formed part of our series this month on the 15-year anniversary of the first democratic elections in South Africa. Rosinah was telling me how their mother passed away several years ago after becoming infected with HIV, and it fell to the siblings to raise Vuyani.

"We're a child-headed household," Rosinah said.

This was not, strictly speaking, untrue. But the children in this case, Rosinah and two older brothers, were in their 20s when their mother passed on.

Not to diminish the Ngxalaba family's difficulties -- which I came to understand after spending several days with them last month -- but "child-headed household" is a term coined by the vast development universe of aid agencies, consultants, diplomatic missions and others to describe families where parents die and leave children raising other children. It's a way to measure how the fabric of society is torn apart by conflict, diseases like AIDS and other disasters. It's not a way you'd expect a family to describe itself in casual conversation.

Catch phrases and acronyms are part of any industry. But in Africa, the highfalutin, almost clinical development lingo used by aid workers -- let's call it charitese -- has a baffling and often amusing tendency to seep into the vernacular of regular people.

Covering the 2005 elections in Liberia, I interviewed a handful of villagers outside Monrovia and found that all of them were hoping for a vote that was "free, fair and transparent." In that order. It was a couple of days before I realized that this was the exact phrase that the small army of NGOs and election experts had been lecturing Liberians on for more than a year, and plastering on countless posters, t-shirts and other election materials.

Another time, in the slums of Nairobi, I heard a middle-school girl tell me, "I'm an OVC." This is charitese for "orphans and vulnerable children," but it is not something that a child should call herself, not least because it sounds like a television shopping network.

I've seen African grassroots NGOs with names like the "Organization for Capacity Building and Sustainable Development" -- combining two particularly common bits of charitese into one big string of meaninglessness. I've received multiple invitations to events discussing the fate of "the girl child," who faces all kinds of difficulties that the boy child does not. And I can't believe they paid someone to come up with the term "income-generating activities" -- you know, jobs.

This is mostly harmless, and often humorous, but sometimes get the nagging sense that these terms have been foisted onto Africans, who have no choice but to start using them, ridiculous though they do sound in conversation. The humanitarian world offers jobs, fills hotels and conference centers, and pays for things that some governments in Africa can't or won't do. So I fear that people fail to adopt charitese at their peril.

What do you think? Am I being too hard on the NGOs? And what are your favorite examples of charitese?