Past newsletters 2002

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Plain English update 22 February 2002

He may be a regular candidate for our Foot in Mouth awards, but it seems George Bush has caught the plain English bug.

The foreword to this year's United States budget begins 'Once in a long time, an established publication presents itself in a new format, and the occasion requires an explanation to readers grown accustomed to the old form... This budget attempts to simplify information, to reduce the use of jargon, and to illustrate its contentions more liberally with charts, tables and real-life examples.'

You may remember the fuss last year when the Government appointed television celebrity chef Loyd Grossman to head a new catering scheme in British hospitals.

Unfortunately his glamorous offerings have run into a problem - patients can't understand the menu.

Staff at Blackburn Royal Infirmary, where the scheme is being trialled, will now rewrite the menus in 'plain English'. 'Beef carbonnade' will become 'a rich beef casserole' while 'kidneys turbigo' will be renamed 'kidneys fried in butter'.

Director of operations Mike Hall said the change was not meant to reinforce stereotypes about the north-south divide. 'We are not saying Blackburn people can understand them any less than anywhere else.'

Local MP Peter Bike said 'It is quite right that menus should be written in language people understand. They don't want to have to guess at what they are going to eat.'

As a special service to all our supporters who use computers, we are delighted to pass on this warning, which was sent to one of our supporters.

'For earlier software releases, an illegal loop is created under the following conditions:

'A Gigastack GBIC port within a daisy-chain stack connection is connected to a Gigastack GBIC port of another device in the stack that already has a Gigastack GBIC port connected to a device in that stack; both ports are in the same stack.'

It's been bad news all round for rail passengers in the southwest recently. If industrial action wasn't bad enough, they have to decipher the following note.

'South West Trains have suspended car park enforcement on the strike days. In addition to the strike days car park season ticket holders can park in any South West Trains car park on days either side of the strike day. It is likely that passengers will rail-head. However, daily car park ticket holders should purchase a ticket on any of these days for the car park in which they are parked. South West Trains are not refunding car park season tickets which is no different to usual.'Readers of the Guardian newspaper have been sharing their examples of ambiguous English in signs this week. Examples included a restaurant's 'Once you've eaten here, you'll recommend others' and a chemist's 'We dispense with accuracy.'

Alerted to the problem, the chemist changed the sign to 'We don't dispense with accuracy.'

Meanwhile one of our supporters passed on a story, of uncertain accuracy, that civil servants in India who were seeking a pay rise held signs demanding 'Increased Emoluments now'.

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Plain English update 15 February 2002

Also in the Guardian, columnist Michele Hanson wrote about a friend who had received instructions on how to teach the book 'Huckleberry Finn' to his pupils. Apparently he was meant to encourage the study of 'metaphor of artery and artery of microcosm/macrocosm.'

Another piece of legal Latin left our courtrooms this week. The phrase was 'amicus curiae', translated as 'friend of the court'. It meant a barrister who was hired to give an impartial opinion to a court, rather than to represent either side. The term has been replaced with 'advocate to the court'.

We've seen many stories about text messages over the last couple of years. A survey by the Mobile Data Association this week revealed that 80% of managers in UK firms communicate by text message, receiving up to 40 a day.

Unfortunately the survey revealed that one in three admits to being baffled frequently by abbreviated messages.

We have a new twist on the 'new edition dictionary' story this week. The publishers of the Collins Gem English pocket dictionary have reminded journalists of some of the words that first appeared 100 years ago.

Entries that are still with us from 1902 include 'suitcase', 'Middle East' and 'manic depressive.'

However, terms such as 'groceteria' (supermarket), 'hippomobile' (horse-drawn vehicle) and 'spike-bozzle' (disabling an enemy weapon) have dropped out of everyday use.

It seems that whenever 'new' words and phrases enter the dictionary, about half survive and half soon fall from favour. We'll let you guess which of the following 2002 entries will still be here in a century.

• Mini-me (an assistant who resembles his or her master, personally or politically)
• MVVD (male vertical volume drinker - a customer who prefers standing up in a bar)
• Nopo (A train that does not need a person on-board to operate it)
• Bed-blocker (A hospital patient that is well enough to be discharged but has nowhere to go when they leave)

The humble apostrophe has been in the news with one organisation 'declaring war' on its misuse.

Graham Chapman, leader of Nottingham City Council, has encouraged the council's 14,000 employees to donate one pound to charity every time they misuse an apostrophe.

Speaking on BBC radio, our spokesman John Lister explained the problems such mistakes can cause.

'This isn't always the kind of mistake that can make a document incomprehensible; the reader can usually work out the correct meaning. However, it is a mistake that creates a very bad impression. Many people will see a misused apostrophe and give more thought to the writer's error than to the message. In this way, misused apostrophes can limit the effectiveness of communication.

The Nottingham campaign has got off to a fine start: the first person to pay a fine was chief executive John Richards.

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Plain English update 1 February 2002

Fortunately we at Plain English Campaign make a point of concentrating solely on information writing and not art. But we know many of our supporters were baffled by the inexplicable apostrophe in the name of pop band Hear'say. So we suggest they look away now...

This week, a singer named 'P!nk' released an album titled 'M!ssundaztood'.

We know that highlighting the typographical mistakes of others is too much like tempting fate. But now and again, a case comes along that is too unfortunate to ignore.

A former lecturer received a letter from Prime Minister Tony Blair's 'Direct Communications Unit'. The letter, which dealt with the Department for Education and Skills, had three misspelt words.

They were 'deparment', 'eduaction' and 'skils'.

A road sign in Scotland has sparked debate over the effects of misspelt words.

The sign, in Peeblesshire, refers to a blind summit as a 'blind summet'. One theory has it that such a mistake might prompt drivers to pay more attention to road signs.

However, the opposing argument says mistakes will distract the attention of the driver, and even an extra half-second glancing at a sign can increase the chances of an accident. This is one of the main reasons road signs in Britain were changed from all capitals to the easier-to-read lower case.

There will be no update next week because of staff holiday. In the meantime, we'll leave you with our favourite quotes of the week. One is from Daily Mail parliamentary columnist Quentin Letts, writing about a social security debate.

'Benefits welfare is now so complicated that its language sometimes sounds like the noise a computer makes when its modem is linking up to another distant device.'

And his colleague at the Times, Ben Macintyre, wrote the same day about a debate riddled with abbreviations and acronyms.

'...UNDP, DFIF, UNMAS, IMF and AIA... Sir Peter Hardcastle looked even more confused, stuck a finger in his ear, and showed every sign of a man preparing to go AWOL PDQ and get outside for a G'n'T ASAP.'

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