Past newsletters 2003

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Plain English update 28 November 2003

McDonalds found itself in trouble with the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) this week. They published an advert headlined 'THE STORY OF OUR FRIES. (END OF STORY)' and showing a potato in a fries box. It claimed 'First, we take the potatoes. (The Russet Burbank, Shepody and Pentland Dell are the only varieties we use because they're the perfect shape and especially good for frying.) We peel them, slice them, fry them and that's it. This simple process might not make for a very long story, but it certainly makes for irresistibly long fries.'

Unfortunately several customers complained that the fries were frozen while partially cooked, flown around the world and then deep fried again, that a large portion of salt was added, and that a sugar solution including dextrose was sometimes added.

McDonalds argued that the advert was not intended to be 'a literal and comprehensive statement of all the processes involved'. The ASA ruled that, in that case, they should not use the phrases 'END OF STORY' and 'and that's it'.

We like to bring you the latest jargon, and we have a great term for you this week. A spokesman for Cadburys, giving evidence at a House of Commons inquiry into the links between 'junk' food and obesity, pointed out the benefit of chocolate's 'pauseability'.

It turned out he was arguing that, a customer can stop eating a bar midway and leave the rest until later, while with a hamburger they are more tempted to eat it all at once.

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Plain English update 21 November 2003

We have good news for readers living in Melbourne, but bad news for those in Brisbane and Cairns. Contrary to our correction last week, the new rules calling for plain English in consumer contracts apply to the Australian state of Victoria and not, as we said, Queensland. Apologies for the mistake.

The new head of the Learning and Skills Council, the government organisation responsible for adult education, has condemned education jargon.

In his first speech in the job, Mark Haysom told college heads that 'I have to say I am somewhat taken aback by the language of this world of education that I have joined. I am surprised by the assumption of knowledge, the jargon, the acronyms and the lack of clarity. What strikes me most of all is that the language of education appears to have been taken away from you and hijacked by the new speak of the bureaucrats. You must believe me when I tell you that it is particularly alienating and confusing to people from the world of business.'

There was an intriguing ? but sadly misleading ? story about an embarrassing food label this week. Sharwood's launched a £6 million advertising campaign for their new curry sauce, named 'Bundh'. Unfortunately claims then began circulating that the word meant 'backside' (or a less polite alternative) in Punjabi.

However, Sharwood's pointed out that 'bundh' actually means 'closed' in Punjabi, referring to the method of cooking where meats and spices are slowly cooked in a sealed pot. Turning this into the phrase for backside is only possible by taking liberties with pronunciation. As one Punjabi speaker told journalists, you could get exactly the same effect by mispronouncing the name James Bond.

You may remember that back in December 2001, the Financial Services Authority won a Golden Bull award for a particularly long-winded passage in a consultation paper. Unfortunately it seems brevity is still not in fashion at the FSA. According to consultants Compliance Solutions, in the last two years the FSA has issued consultation papers totalling 23,000 pages!

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Plain English update 14 November 2003

We have a correction to our story last week about new regulations in Australia demanding plain English and a reasonable font size in consumer contracts. Unfortunately the new regulations only apply in the state of Queensland (home to Brisbane and Cairns) rather than nationwide. Apologies if we raised false hopes for the rest of the country!

An international network for food allergy sufferers has accused manufacturers of confusing and misleading through inconsistent labelling. The Food Allergy & Anaphylaxis Network says problems include:

• terms 'may contain' and 'free from' being used inconsistently;
• labels claiming products are 'dairy-free' when they contain casein, a milk protein; and
• flavouring being listed simply as 'natural flavours' with no indication of what is used.

The group also found that the difficulty of finding information on labels means an average shopping trip takes 39% longer when the shopper has a food allergy.

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Plain English update 7 November 2003

The latest document to be rewritten in plain English is the official rules of golf. The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews (R&A) and the United States Golf Association review the rulebook every four years, but this is the first time they have made a specific point of looking at style as well as content.

R&A rules secretary David Rickman (pictured over) said: 'In an essentially self-regulating sport, players need the rules readily available and as simple to understand as we can make them. This is the biggest change in content and presentation of the rules for 20 years and, while the rules remain detailed and precise, we have clarified and simplified them where possible.'

The clearer rules should also make the task of translation easier. The rulebook is reproduced in 20 languages, from Arabic to siSwati (spoken in Swaziland).

The Australian government has followed Europe's lead by banning consumer contract terms that are not written in plain English. The changes came in amendments to the country's Fair Trading Act.

While British laws merely refer to the need for legible print, the Australian laws now specifically demand a minimum ten point font size.

The Consumers Association (CA) claims major computer advertisers are using different interpretations of industry terms to confuse and mislead buyers. They said 'manufacturers are telling the truth in a technical sense. However, providing consumers with the correct technical specifications isn't meaningful if you don't also give them the information necessary to make sense of them.'

Jessica Ross, the editor of 'Computing Which?', said 'Until we reach a consensus on how technical terms are defined and used so that they reflect the reality of what a product can actually do, rather than what's merely possible, manufacturers will continue to promote their products in a way that is misleading.'

Oddly, the CA's press release on the issue began with a bid for the year's strangest analogy. To (presumably) illustrate the point that advertising is designed to sell a product but should still be honest, they said that 'while most women don't expect to meet a tall handsome stranger if they pig out on a certain brand of chocolate, they do expect the chocolate to taste, well... chocolatey.'

Financial Times writer Jeremy Grant recently visited Chicago?s futures exchange (where people effectively gamble on whether a particular financial market will have risen or fallen by a particular date). He asked somebody to explain how a typical trade worked... and soon wished he hadn't.

'In the options we trade the 'at-the-money' straddle, which would be buying the put and the call of a single strike exercised at the closest to the futures price right now, the ninety eight, eighty one and a half, ninety eight, eighty seven and a half. The guy on the phone picks up the phone and says 'where's the deece 87 straddle? The yellow coats ask the blue coats in my group. I ask the pit and they say 'nine ten'. I tell the yellow coats, they tell the guys at Deutsche Bank, they tell the guys in Germany and they say buy a thousand.'

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