Campaign for Plainer Newspeak

Anyone who sits through meetings ticking off phrases like “leveraging” and “best practice” on a secret bingo card recognises how vile office language can be. All the same, the Local Government Association’s list of words that should be banned on Plain English grounds is a bit crazy.

LGA chairman Margaret Eaton said: “The public sector must not hide behind impenetrable jargon and phrases.”

I think there’s a minor Fail, right there. “The public sector” is not exactly Not-Jargon, is it? The BBC even had to help her out a bit by saying “national and local government” in the next sentence, so readers who are unfamiliar with official jargon would know what she meant. And, surely, many people wouldn’t understand the word “impenetrable”

I’m all for the principle of officials explaining what they mean. The actual list of banned words has some stinkers but there are many phrases there that would be hard to replace.

Banning some of these words would make entire branches of knowledge invisible. I have to assume that “downstream”, “lever”, “fulcrum”, “toolkit,” “seedbed”, “mechanism” are banned for metaphorical use only. Otherwise car maintenance, physics, geography and gardening are all in trouble.

Some of the other words seem to have no reasonable alternatives. They would have to be replaced by a couple of explanatory sentences, which surely wouldn’t help to make them clearer:
Ambassador. Welcome. Area based. Capacity. Customer. Client. Agencies. Flex. Vision.

I defy anyone to describe an ambassador without using the forbidden A word itself or some much more complicated and incomprehensible formulation that refers to vice-counsels and international relations. Without referring to “protocol”, because that’s on the list.

Welcome – argh. Depends on the context. I can’t really think of any way to say “Welcome to X Council” that isn’t either longer or less welcoming. If you have to greet an ambassador then you really are in Plain English trouble,.

Area based: Erm, erm…. Set in a place. (Am tying myself in mental knots to avoid saying geographical. “Set” is a rubbishy choice anyway, though, but I can’t say focussed. I think it’s on the list.)

Customer – erm, “person who buys things or gets some sort of service”. (Can’t cheat and say “client”. That’s on the list.)

Outcomes was so bad they named it twice. I’ll assume that was a typo, because it doesn’t seem like a major offender. “Results” is only one letter shorter and I’m sure that most people could guess that they mean roughly the same thing from the context.

And what about “sustainable” and “freedoms”? It usually takes 3,000 word undergraduate essays to start to explain these concepts. Are council workers going to have to precis them.

num_Items<=10

Do you understand “Ten items or less?”

If you were standing in the supermarket queue with a handful of grocery items, you could count them, reach 10 and feel pretty sure that you could go through the (often ironically-titled) Quick Checkout. (Assuming you aren’t worrying about whether a collection of 4 rolls in one bag counts as one item or four. Argh. A bunch of grapes? How many items is that? Maybe one, if they are firmly attached to the stalk. But a few might fall off and tip the balance against you. )

Pedantically, you might think the sign should say “fewer.” However, a supermarket sign isn’t an English essay. In any case, modern grammar books are likely to suggest that observing modern usage reflects better style than sounding deliberately pompous. Well, I would, at least, setting myself up as grammar expert, in the face of the evidence that I’m not.

Pedant alert. I get as riled about misplaced apostrophe(‘)s and stupid grammar as anyone does. Sentences like 🙂 such as “He asked my husband and I where we were going” are really annoying. This usage ignores the basic rules of grammar – confusing where to use subject and object pronouns. The offensive bit aspect is that it’s done just to sound formally correct. To evade the scary grammar teacher in the sky who might smite any sentence, at random, if it doesn’t sound stilted enough.)

Back to the supermarket. According to the BBC:

Tesco is to change the wording of signs on its fast-track checkouts to avoid any linguistic dispute.
The supermarket giant is to replace its current “10 items or less” notices with signs saying “Up to 10 items”.
Tesco’s move follows uncertainty over whether the current notices should use “fewer” instead of “less”.
The new wording was suggested to Tesco by language watchdog The Plain English Campaign.

What? “Up to ten items” is less confusing than “10 items or less”? No it isn’t.

There are ten items in your basket. Which checkout do you use? If the sign says “Up to 11 items,” you can walk through the Quick checkout, smugly confident that your basket contents meet the numeric criteria. But, it says “Up to ten.” The Plain English campaign thinks “Up to” means the same as “Less than or equal to.” It may do. I’m not sure.

I am sure that “ten items or less” includes the number ten. It’s right there, mentioned by name even.

Fear of breaking a rule about correct use of “fewer” or “less,” which is almost never observed in spoken English has led Tesco to make its signs ambiguous, where they were previously clear.

The Plain English campaign is taking the credit for this silliness. Use of plain English is a desirable goal. This campaign was started decades ago to challenge the bureaucratic language used in official documents. The valid point is that some documents are incomprehensible to anyone, particularly to people who are not very literate.

However, some items on their website suggest that they have come to interpret their role in “grammar and spelling police” terms.

For instance, they castigate a University lecturer for mildly suggesting that bad spelling isn’t the end of the world.

Dr Smith, a lecturer in criminology at Buckinghamshire New University, suggested that students and lecturers should be ‘given a break’ and allow misspellings of words such as ‘judgment’, ‘twelfth’, and ‘embarrassed’ (from the news page on the plain English campaign site)

They complain furiously that students can get good marks in SATS tests despite errors, as if the content is less important than the sub-editing:

… revealed that an essay littered with spelling and grammatical errors had received a higher mark than another, more literate one.

So, it is with a pedantic glee that I reprint this paragraph:

We are part of Liverpool and it’s history and culture so naturally we want to be part of the Capital of Culture celebrations. As the campaign grew out of the frustration of ordinary people in Liverpool with the way they were being treated we feel that it is right that we should return to the city at this time. We’ll be reminding everyone of the importance of clear language and how this can help people understand what to do and what is happening in their lives” says Chrissie

it’s. at this time instead of now. Missing commas where you need them to make sense of the sentence.

It’s hardly surprising that so many government documents (that are supposed to show a commitment to using “plain English” ) remain completely incomprehensible, given that the UK government takes so much of its Plain English advice from this organisation.

Gibberish and the Emperor’s new clothes

Whenever I hear the phrase like “innovative, grassroots-driven, decentralized, and empowering campaign” I reach for my gun….

These words were in the site of a supporter for a Massachusetts politician, Deval Patrick, about whom my knowledge is less than or equal to none, except for his having been associated with a plan to get community feedback that somehow put every voter’s personal information online, as far as I can determine from universalhub. Otherwise, he seems OK by US politician standards. (Well, he seems to be a Democrat for a start. It was hard to find anything about his politics in the sites I trawled trying to find out if I was doing the man an injustice here. This blog is nothing if not fair. OK, it’s more like nothing.)

Would people even consider voting for politicians who weren’t surrounded by a fog of cheerful phrases that didn’t have any content? Identifiable ideas might lose votes. Who would be so churlish as to not be in favour of innovation? Grass-roots driven things? Decentralised? Empowering? (Wow, it could have almost come from Paolo Freire, if his actual content hadn’t been sucked out.)

I have just read a well nigh 50-page consultant’s report on the department where I work. It could have been written by the same person. The consultancy fee will have equalled the salary of a couple of peon employees like me. They generated any content there was by consulting employees. Shouldn’t we have got some sort of cut?

The final text was obviously put together with the help of a Gibberish-generating programme, into which they must have fed whole volumes full of phrases like the words above. Then, translated the words into Basque, using Babelfish, retranslated the result into an obscure variant of Icelandic Gibberish and then got Dilbert’s manager to wring out any residual shred of meaning and replace it with phrases about empowerment and core values so upbeat that Ned Flanders would be embarrassed to utter them.

The report may be favourable. Who could tell? No one dares say that it doesn’t mean anything. It’s really the emperor’s new clothes. In pdf format.