Bill Lutz, Professor Emeritus at Rutgers University, has been on a personal campaign to increase the use of plain language for years.
In an interview with Mark Kelly on the CBC Newsworld program Connect (October 14, 2011, Professor Lutz pointed out that layoffs have created a rich vein of made-up jargon. “At one point I had 114 terms [for layoffs]; ‘reduction in force,’ of course, is a common one, but I like ‘voluntary reduction in force.’ I have this view of people raising their hands and saying ‘Fire me. Fire me.’ ”
He adds a few other favourites are “Elimination of redundancies in the human resources area;” or the Philadelphia company that laid off 500 people but did not like to call the layoffs what they were. The business preferred to state that the company is “continually managing our human resources. Sometimes, we manage them up, sometimes we manage them down.”
A Failure to Communicate
Governments are fond of using long-winded language.
Advanced interrogation techniques became popular among Bush Administration officials to describe what to everyone else was simply torture. Professor Lutz notes that the original usage of that phrase can be found in the Holocaust Museum in Berlin where there is a document in which a Gestapo official asks his superiors for permission to use “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
Another Bush administration quote criticized by the Plain English Campaign came from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld in 2002: “There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
Rumsfeld could be criticized for many things, but a careful reading of this statement reveals that it does actually make sense; which is more than can be said for many of the things that came out of his boss’s mouth. Here’s a George W. Bush gem from July 2001: “I know what I believe. I will continue to articulate what I believe and what I believe – I believe what I believe is right.”
It was quotes such as this that prompted Britain’s Plain English Campaign to give President Bush a Lifetime Achievement Award.
Achievements in Convoluted Speech
Other recipients of this not-so-coveted trophy include:
Richard Gere, who told the Guardian newspaper in 2002: “I know who I am. No one else knows who I am. Does it change the fact of who I am what anyone says about it? If I was a giraffe, and someone said I was a snake, I’d think, no, actually I’m a giraffe.”
Alicia Silverstone was promoting her 2001 movie “Clueless” (the title gives a hint about its intellectual depth) when she tried to pitch it as something more meaningful in an interview with the Telegraph in the U.K: “I think that the film ‘Clueless’ was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it’s true lightness.”
Obfuscation Fighter
James H. Boren was a U.S. government official who later campaigned for the use of plain language. He published his book “When in Doubt Mumble” as a tongue-in-cheek guide for people who wanted to obscure the meaning of what they had to say. Another of his successful books was “How to be a Sincere Phoney, a Handbook for Politicians and Bureaucrats” (1999). His advice to those facing difficult decisions was “When in doubt, mumble; when in trouble, delegate; when in charge, ponder.”
Boren created the Order of the Bird that he handed out to those who inflicted gobbledygook on the innocent public and he said that “bureaucracy is the epoxy that greases the wheels of government.”
Sources
- “Bafflegab Gobbledygook: War on Meaningless, Redundant Lingo Heats up.” Connect with Mark Kelly, CBC Newsworld, October 14, 2011.
- “American Gigolo in London.” Libby Brooks, The Guardian, June 7, 2002.
- “Statesman, Teacher Made a Joke of Bad Politics.” Tim Stanley, Tulsa World, April 27, 2010.
Rupert Taylor - Rupert Taylor is the editor of a magazine that provides background to current events.
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