Plain English Campaign’s latest “Golden Bull” awards
Years ago, a famous satirist quit the gig when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace prize. He claimed it was unfair competition. I feel the same when the Plain English Campaign publishes its annual Golden Bull awards. Here are some of this year’s winners:
EastleighBorough Council for a Notice given under the Building Act 1984
‘Hereby in accordance with the provision of the Building Act 1984, Section 32 declares that the said plans shall be of no effect and accordingly the said Act and the said Building Regulations shall as respects the proposed work have effect as if no plan had been deposited.’
The Institute for Fiscal Studies for a website document description
‘While the literature on nonclassical measurement error traditionally relies on the availability of an auxiliary dataset containing correctly measured observations, this paper establishes that the availability of instruments enables the identification of a large class of nonclassical nonlinear errors-in-variables models with continuously distributed variables.’
There is a surprising lack of business examples. Perhaps there is still a role for BadLanguage.net
Andrew Denny wrote:
Perhaps you are right, Matthew. But I have come across quite a few examples from the Plain English Campaign’s ‘rogues’ gallery’ that misunderestimate, so to speak, the writer’s original intention.
For example, in its early days I seem to recall the PEC criticised the term ‘user friendly’, telling people to use ‘easy to use’. Similarly in WW2 Winston Churchill execrated ‘top secret’, insisting on ‘most secret’.
Of course, these weren’t convoluted passages like the example you give. But often, as with legalese, the convoluted phrase is there to cover every option.
For example, ‘cease and desist’ - doesn’t ceasing something automatically include desisting?
Posted on 14-Dec-06 at 4:00 pm | Permalink
Schizohedron wrote:
Andrew: Could it mean “Cease [stop doing it right now] and desist [don't do it in the future]“? I’m not going to delve into the Necronomicon–like depths of Black’s Law Dictionary to verify it; my sanity is frayed enough!
Posted on 14-Dec-06 at 9:48 pm | Permalink
Nancy Friedman wrote:
I remember reading long ago that legal language is full of tautologies like cease and desist, law and order, free and clear, to have and to hold, fit and proper, and will and testament because of the conflict between legal systems after the Norman invasion of 1066. In most of those word pairs, one of the words is an old English word and the other is Latin/French. Rather than choose one language over another, the English legal system let both have their day in, well, court. There’s an interesting discussion of legal English at http://www.dhlaw.de/eng/elt/manuscript.pdf.
Posted on 15-Dec-06 at 10:57 pm | Permalink
Uncommon Knowledge: free alternative business and technology knowledge to save you time and money. » Improve your speaking and writing through storytelling: part 1. wrote:
[...] One more important point: don’t create unnecessary flourishes in your writing or you’ll end up drowning in them. Keep it simple and just write you mean. [...]
Posted on 19-Dec-06 at 6:03 pm | Permalink