Past newsletters 2004

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Plain English update 26 March 2004

Thank you to everybody who nominated their most irritating phrases and welcome to those of you who have joined the Campaign this week. We have had gained almost a thousand new supporters this week, with this newsletter going to 5862 people.

The ten most irritating phrases, in order of nominations, were:

1 At the end of the day

2 (joint) At this moment in time

2 (joint) Like

4 With all due respect

5 To be honest

6 Touch base

7 I hear what you're saying

8 Going forward

9 Absolutely

10 Blue sky thinking

The widespread coverage of the survey (including an appearance on the front page of The Times and national television pieces on BBC1, BBC News 24 and Sky News) suggests we have struck a nerve, opened a can of worms, heard what people are saying, scored a home run, and any other cliché you wish to use!

Our spokesman John Lister took part in interviews for radio stations in Ireland, Canada, the United States, South Africa, Australia and New Zealand. Given the subject it's probably not surprising that only one presenter ended an interview with the phrase we hear so often in these situations: "more power to your elbow".

We have received so many suggestions since publishing the list that we are thinking of holding a similar survey each year to see which of today's fresh buzzwords have become tomorrow's tired clichés.

Thank you also to everyone who has written with messages of support. We are working our way through the e-mail backlog and will try to answer all questions in the next week.

We also received several e-mails that simply read "Get a life." We're not sure if these were intended to be general comments about us or nominations for clichés!

Like many of you, we receive hundreds of spam (unsolicited) e-mails each week. It seems the people behind them are now well aware that one method of filtering these e-mails is to block anything with certain words (free, viagra, weight-loss and so on) in the subject line. Instead the senders are now generating e-mails with apparently random words, sometimes with quite poetic results. A couple we've had recently are "grammar congresswoman" and "carrot necromancer".

We've often noted the way that attempts to clarify government forms are hampered by the sheer complexity of the tax and benefits system. Further proof comes from a report by Parliament's Public Accounts Committee which revealed this week that mistakes are made in processing about 20% of benefit claims. The cost of these problems (including genuine mistakes and fraud) is somewhere between three and seven billion pounds a year.

The report also says that the error rate for one benefit, Disability Living Allowance, is almost 50%. You may remember that five years ago the Government admitted that six billion pounds a year was not being claimed by people who were legally entitled to the benefit.

Edward Leigh, chair of the committee, said that there was only one real solution: "Unless someone gets a grip and simplifies the system, nothing will improve."

There is some good news, though. Self-assessment tax forms will, for most users, be getting shorter. Rather than giving everybody the full 12 page form (which contains questions irrelevant to most users), the Inland Revenue will send a simplified four-page form to people with simpler tax affairs. Tax officials will look at previous returns to identify people suitable for the shortened form.

We couldn't finish this week's newsletter without bringing you these words from Prime Minister's Question Time from Wednesday (where John Prescott stood in for Tony Blair).

Mr. Peter Luff (Mid-Worcestershire): What are the Government planning to do to help the Plain English Campaign celebrate its 25th anniversary later this year? What will the Deputy Prime Minister do personally to help it wage its war on gobbledegook?

The Deputy Prime Minister: The hon. Gentleman, from time to time, may get his grammar right, but his thinking on politics and his common sense are often missing. And to that we can add the sketch writers as well. But I will not be addressing the conference.

(Fortunately, we aren't planning to hold a conference!)

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Plain English update 12 March 2004

One of our readers has asked if anyone can suggest a suitable wording for a particularly situation. It concerns advertising, where 'free' is often used in cases where there is no charge for the product on offer, but the consumer must pay something for postage, packing or handling. Our reader is trying to find a suitable expression that will be easily understood in situations where the consumer does not have to pay anything at all.

Sometimes journalists call us with a story and we wonder if it's April Fool's Day. We had that feeling this week when we heard that British Gas have told staff to use 'text message' language for internal e-mails and memos. The theory is that typing fewer characters (for example, InvSTg8 in place of investigate) will save staff 8,333 minutes a day. "This will save us thousands of pounds a day", claimed media relations manager Alan McLaughlin.

As we explained on BBC Radio Five Live, this theory is fine except that:

• the writer will have to remember the abbreviated version of the phrase they wise to use;
• the writer will have to type an unfamiliar 'word', including the unfamiliar technique of using capitalised letters in the middle of the word;
• the writer will have to check spelling manually or teach the new spellings to their word processor's spellchecker;
• the reader will have to read letter by letter until they are familiar enough to recognise the abbreviated versions by shape; and
• the reader will have to remember what the abbreviated versions mean.

The story came the day before a survey for consultants Aziz Corporation found that around two-thirds of company bosses felt text message language was damaging the literacy skills of their staff.

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Plain English update 5 March 2004

We wonder if any local authority experts can settle a question that caused a lengthy debate in our offices this week.

• Parking notices often include a note such as "Maximum parking 2 hours. No return within 1 hour."
• But when does the 'no return' period (the "1 hour") start?
• Is it:at the end of the full parking period (2 hours in this example), regardless of when you actually drive away;
• when you drive away (even if you leave 'early'); or
• some other time?

One of our readers sent this to us. The jargon may well have been understood by the writer. Unfortunately the reader wasn't 'in the know'...

"The Management Team agreed that a 'top down' approach to oversight and moderation of original assessment processes and box marking outcomes at line manager level. The aim would be to achieve this through application of standard assessment models aimed at establishing as near as possible an outcome to the prescribed distribution curve at first pass so that 'back end' RAP moderation would be minimised and transparency about outcomes could be maintained."

The best suggestion we've heard so far is that "'back end' RAP moderation" is something to do with toning down raunchy music videos.

Michael Skapinker of the Financial Times wrote an interesting piece this week about overused phrases. He nominated five examples.

• Wake-up call (which was used 136 times by English-language newspapers this week, a sign it has become a tired phrase)
• Double whammy
• Spectacular own goal
• Turning in his grave
• A delicate balancing act

So what would be on your list of phrases that have seen better days? Let us know and we'll publish the suggestions in a future edition of this newsletter.

The staff behind www.freesearch.co.uk released a list of the ten most commonly searched words on their dictionary service. We're not quite sure what the list says about language and literacy today.

• Three of them, in first, third and sixth place, were obscenities. (As we don't want to be triggering e-mail filters for a third straight week, we'll leave these to your imagination.)
• Two are terms often used and abused in business writing: holistic (fourth) and paradigm (fifth).
• Four were apparently down to confusion about spelling: affect (sixth) and effect (eighth), practise (ninth, with practice in thirteenth), and liase (with liaise in twelfth).
• And tenth place went to love. (Which is particularly curious considering how many slushy pop songs have claimed to explain the meaning of the word!)

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