Past newsletters 2004

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Plain English update 30 July 2004

In a change to our usual format, this week we bring you our founder Chrissie Maher's memories of the day Plain English Campaign formally launched with a gobbledygook-shredding stunt in the shadow of Parliament: 25 years ago this week. We'll be back with our usual newsletter next week.

When we arrived the night before the launch, we found a spot where we could park the van without getting towed and went to have a look at the Square itself. I'd been there during the lobbying of the past couple of years but I'd never noticed exactly how imposing the place was. Big Ben seemed huge.

The major problem seemed to be how to get the boxes and the shredder from the van to the grass. It involved crossing the main road and, although the boxes were light, they were bulky and obvious. The police would see us coming a mile off. I'd never seen so many police. They were everywhere.

The problems seemed too great. There were two zebra crossings to navigate with a shredder, countless boxes, and a flat-folding walpaper pasting table - all this in one of the most security-conscious areas on mainland Britain.

It seemed a big risk, just to give the British public an image of shredded paper standing on a rickety table. And the press mightn't even be interested. We drove away from the Square in silence. It just didn't seem as if it was meant to be.

That night was one of the worst I've ever had. There was so much at stake for me personally and the campaign I believed in. Mixed with the fear, though, was excitement and anticipation. I had to build myself up into the same brass-necked Chrissie who'd sat for hours outside the offices of public officials just to get a chance to have my voice heard.

I still wasn't sure I was doing the right thing. I nearly called it off. Then I thought of the press; if they did turn up and we didn't, there would never again be a chance to let the whole country hear our plea.

The next morning we found a parking place round the back of Big Ben. I took a peek into the Square . . . and there were camera crews! By now I was in a panic. I could see them and they could see me; the only question was, were the police watching us both?

We started moving. All the boxes were ferried across the road with little regard for the cars. I dragged the paste table across the road and then someone banged down the shredder. I looked over towards the big Parliamentary gates and sure enough, the police were talking into their radios.

We arranged the boxes in a nice photogenic wall behind the table and the press were descending on us from all corners.

So were the police. With scores of pressmen crowding in to hear the conversation, one of the policemen spoke.

"I must ask you to leave." Cameras clicked, and the hand shredder churned away. I just stood there and said nothing, so he repeated the order.

"Under what law are we being asked to go?" I was amazed at the amount of fuss that was being caused. Even in my wildest fantasies I hadn't expected so many pressmen.

I could hear the radio on the policeman's shoulder. A nervous voice was saying, "What's going on over there? I repeat: what's going on over there?"

The constable at his side took off his radio and replied, "Demonstration, peaceful. I'm moving them along." Then he told me he was ordering us to disperse by his powers under the Metropolitan Police Act 1839.

What happened next was a stroke of luck that couldn't have been any more helpful for the Campaign if we'd set it up ourselves. It turned out that for the order to be effective, he had to read the relevant passage from the Act. It was filled with legal jargon, and it was so long-winded that reading it took about five minutes. The press were delighted and so was I. They were all shoving microphones under his nose and cameras were clicking like mad.

The policeman was gracious enough to help the broadcasters get a clear recording by running through it a second time. I could have kissed him, but I'm sure he would have locked me up then! I think he knew that we were sincere in our campaign and had a little sympathy with us. He really did us a great favour.

When he had finished reading it for the second time, there was a short pause. I looked him in the eye and said, "So, in plain English, you mean we've got to shove off!" It was a historic moment for Plain English Campaign. There were many more to come.

The police were now trying to wrap everything up and, after the help they had given us, we tended to agree. Both policemen wished us luck and started to move away. Then one of them turned back and told us there were plenty of documents in his force that needed a good going over!

We told the reporters that all we'd wanted to do was come to Parliament Square and bring their attention to the everyday problems of language, and now we were on our way! The press went wild. By the time we had got the last of the boxes and the table and shredder to the van, I was shaking. It had gone far better than even I had hoped. We had many radio and television interviews hooked in and press interviews by the score.

We arrived home that night an exhausted group of demonstrators. The next morning, though, it hit us. How one earth were we going to live up to all this and how were we going to keep the momentum going?

There was still no money and no political support, but we didn't care. The ball had started rolling and we were sure the Campaign would grow.

I thought to myself, "Look out forms, we're coming to get you!"

If only I'd known what a long battle it was going to be..

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Plain English update 23 July 2004

Thank you to everybody who voted in our poll to select the most baffling example of gobbledygook from our 25-year history.

The winner, with 19% of the votes, was the draft National Minimum Wage Regulations from 1988. The regulations defined "non-hours work" with the memorable phrase: "the hours of non-hours work worked by a worker in a pay reference period shall be the total of the number of hours spent by him during the pay reference period in carrying out the duties required of him under his contract to do non-hours work."

Just behind, with 18%, was a 1989 document by STC Technology Limited which explained that, "There is an unavoidable conflict of teminology in naming the classes Class and Instantation. Instantation is not itself a real instance but a class (namely, the class of all real instances). Likewise, Class is not a class of real instances but a class of classes (namely, the class of all classes of real instances). Instantation could be renamed Class and Class renamed Type to avoid this. In that case, the members of Class would not be classes and the members of Type would not be types."

And third place, with 15%, went to a 143-word sentence in a 1982 letter from the Department of Health and Social Security. "From and including 26.2.81 an additional component is payable at the weekly rate of 5p which is the rate appropriate to 11/4% of the amount of the surpluses in the earnings factors for 3 years in the claimant's working life after reduction on account of his guaranteed minimum pension of £2.04 (the guaranteed minimum pension was originally notified to the claimant as £1.99 and has subsequently been amended to £2.04) (Social Security Pensions Act 1975 Section 6 and 29 (1) and the Social Security (Earnings Factor) Regulations reg 2 and the Schedule) and graduated retirement benefit at the weekly rate of £2.37 (£2.58 from 26.2.81) which is the amount appropriate to 67 units of graduated contributions paid or treated as paid by the claimant (National Insurance Act 1965 Section 36 and the Social Security (Graduated Retirement Benefit) (No.2) Regulations reg 3 (3) and Schedule 1)."

The United States House of Representatives has approved the allergy labelling law which we wrote about a few weeks ago. The Food Allergen Labelling and Consumer Protection Act requires food labels to use the plain English terms for eight common substances, including milk and egg. The Act also removes a loophole which previously allowed such substances to be listed as part of catch-all descriptions such as natural flavours, spices, additives or colourings.

The Act will now pass to President Bush for his signature and is expected to take effect from 1 January 2006.

One of our supporters recently ordered a broadband internet service, but there's been a delay. It turns out that the company concerned is having trouble "physically installing the metallic facility path".

In other words, they can't lay the cable.

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Plain English update 16 July 2004

As you may know, our 25th anniversary is on Monday 26th July. We would like you all to help us celebrate in two ways.

We are going to mark the occasion by selecting the most baffling example of gobbledygook in our history. We invited Campaign supporter Kieran Lefort (who was born on the day of our launch in 1979) to choose a shortlist of former Golden Bull winners.

Now we'd like you to choose the winner. Please visit www.plainenglish.co.uk/poll.html to read the shortlist and vote for your choice. Voting closes on Thursday morning.

We also want to use our anniversary to celebrate the more positive side of plain English. We'd like as many of you as possible to take a few minutes during the next week to think of a particularly clear document that you've come across recently. We'd then like you to send a letter, fax or e-mail to the person or organisation responsible to simply say thank you for making the effort to communicate clearly.

A brief correction: Last week we used the term 'industrial tribunals' in a hypothetical example. In reality, the correct term is now 'employment tribunals'.

We have just booked our first plain English course (open to the public) in Northern Ireland. It will take place at the Europa Hotel in Belfast on Wednesday 3 November. For more details, or to book a place, please call our training administrator Heidi Tinsley on 01663 744409.

We saw a couple of quotes about unclear language that amused us this week.

Columnist Philip Howard of the Times was writing about the way general writers 'hijack' specialist terms and use them in a vague way. He said, "Such bafflegabble crutch words are ugly chimneys belching semantic smoke to pollute the atmosphere of understanding. If we mock them hard enough, let us hope that they become laughing-stocks, and eventually die of shame."

In the Sun's 'Hagar the Horrible' cartoon, a character said, "As your lawyer, allow me to clear up this matter for you... in most cases, the defendant supersedes the pro bono factors unless and until the plaintiff decides to coagulate the judicial pontification of all parties involved..." Hagar is shown thinking "I'm SO glad he cleared up that matter for me!"

Plain English update 9 July 2004

We like to think that most types of official documents can be made clearer, but the Guardian reported this week on a case that might have stumped us.

The Intelligence and Security Committee (which includes politicians and peers from several parties) recently produced its annual report. For security reasons, some information is replaced with asterisks before it is published for public reading. In most cases the report still flows naturally and the reader realises that a figure or a name has been removed. But it isn't always so easy.

Paragraph 37 simply reads:

"We have been told that ***

***. We are concerned that ***

***

***

***

***

***. We will return to this matter."

To which, in its official response to the report, the Government simply says:

"The Government notes the Committee's concern and its intention to return to the matter."

We're sure that by now most of our readers are familiar with the way publishers tend to bring out new editions of dictionaries in the summer and help journalists fill space with controversies about the new entries. This week's stories, about the Concise Oxford English Dictionary, seem to have struggled to find too much to get upset about.

Most of the new entries seem fairly straightforward, including:

• gangmaster (a person who oversees the work of casual manual workers);
• cybercrime (criminal activity carried out using a computer); and
• congestion charge (a fee to drive into a certain area, which is intended to reduce traffic levels and raise money - though which the primary aim is depends on your politics).

We weren't convinced by va-va-voom, a word used in an advert for Renault cars. The dictionary offers the catch-all description of "the quality of being exciting, vigorous or sexually attractive", but in the advert the word appears to have been used simply because it has no precise meaning. Given the dictionary's interpretation, we wouldn't be surprised to see an industrial tribunal caused by an advert asking for a candidate with va-va-voom.

And another entry, mentalist (an eccentric or mad person), seems a great example of a slang term that wouldn't be appropriate for formal or official writing.

The Oxford University Press (OUP) has published a list of the most commonly confused words in English. The list is based on a database of recent documents from a variety of sources, adding up to 300 million words.

Surprisingly confusion between its (belonging to a thing previously mentioned) and it's (a contraction of 'it is') seems to be getting rarer: the OUP found the words were mixed up in just 8% of cases.

Examples of the most common mistakes include:

• 'to diffuse a situation' (the correct word is defuse);
• 'a taxi driver has free reign to set his prices' (the correct word is rein);
• 'the manager told employees to tow the line' (the correct word is toe); and
• 'he spent the evening pouring over his magazine' (the correct word is poring).

OUP spokesman Angus Stevenson said such mistakes often came up in documents where the spelling is otherwise correct, possibly because of reliance on computer spellcheckers. "Spellcheckers can tell you whether a word is correctly spelt, but not whether it is properly used."

We've seen many attempts to use linguistic trickery to get out of legal problems, but American singer Glen Campbell's argument against a recent drink driving conviction struck us as particularly cheeky. Apparently he wasn't drunk, merely "overserved".

Plain English update 2 July 2004

Thanks to everybody who has sent examples of foreign equivalents for the term 'gobbledygook'. (By the way, one reader pointed out that the Dutch word 'onzin' is actually a literal translation of 'nonsense'.)

Josi Luis Iparraguirre D'Elia suggested 'galimatmas' or 'jerigonza' in Spanish. Another reader told us that 'beliberda' was the Russian term. Jarka Dvorakova gave us 'kecy' and 'blaf' (both plurals) from Czech.

And another Czech speaker, Daniel Deyl gave an interesting alternative.

"The Czech equivalent is 'ptydepe', pronounced 'pteedehpeh'. The word doesn't sound Czech at all; in fact, it doesn't sound like anything, and neither should it. It was devised by Vaclav Havel, the Czech playwright-turned-president, specifically for the purpose of being utterly incomprehensible. He used it in his play 'The Memorandum' (1965) to denote an artificial language designed to prevent rather than facilitate verbal communication; it is used by omnipotent authorities and their officials. The word, its meaning slightly broadened to denote any excessive officialese, outlived the play and has become part of regular Czech vocabulary. After almost four decades, Havel's compatriots still find it useful. Unlike the communist system which produced it, gobbledygook is still alive and kicking."

Researchers at the University of Central Florida say clearer language and design could reduce the chances of plane crashes.

Florian Jentsch led the study into official notices to airmen (NOTAMS). She concluded that 'plain and simple language' should take the place of abbreviations that can confuse even experienced pilots. She also said that documents need to be reorganised so that pilots can easily find the information specific to their flight.

"This is critical information, yet the way it's transmitted is vintage 1960s or 1970s at best," she said. "As a result, it's an extremely confusing system, and it's very difficult to find what you need."

The study was prompted by a crash in Taiwan in 2000 where investigators concluded that the pilots had trouble extracting and remembering information about a runway closure included in a notice they had received before taking off.

Congratulations to Judge Mark Painter for being featured in a lengthy cover story in Cincinnati's 'CityBeat' magazine. The judge, known for his untiring work to promote plain language in the legal system, is considering suggestions that he run for mayor of the city.

In his book 'The Legal Writer', Judge Painter wrote 'Some judges believe that we write only for lawyers. But we should strive to be understandable to everyone. After all, the cases involve real people ? shouldn't they be able to read what is happening to them?'

The full story is available (at the time of writing) at http://www.citybeat.com/2004-06-30/cover.shtml.

The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King, says he and his board colleagues need to use plainer language. He told the Financial Times that 'We [need to] think carefully about our words but say exactly what we mean, neither more nor less. We don't have people who interpret to the newspapers what the words are supposed to mean. So instead of just using bland language which then requires someone else to interpret it, and creates a new profession of spin doctors, I think it's incumbent on us to say what we mean.'

We came across an interesting word this week, but we're still undecided whether it's a useful addition to the language or an ugly construction. It's 'jurosomatic' ? an injury where the symptoms appear to be heightened by the prospect of legal compensation.

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