Writing to be obscure
There’s no doubt about it, someone, somewhere is laughing at editorial staff. It is probably more than one person – probably a group of people working in league, a network of the well-connected, the rich and powerful. And their objective?
That’s the question. Obviously they’re laughing at editorial staff everywhere but could it be that their primary aim is more sinister than that? Could it be that all this effort – the courses in business English, the proliferation of marketing professionals and management consultants – could it be that all this is really designed to stop anybody from understanding anything that goes on?
Look at this for example: Parliamentary ‘Written answers and statements’ from the 6 July 2009.
“HM Treasury was voted resource provision of £142 million to cover spending on continuing services… The amount on account excluded any provision for financial stability related resource consumption as, at the time, this was expected to be zero.”
This means simply that the Treasury is getting £142 million to cover costs until July. But politicians can’t simply say that, can they? If they did, we the humble voters – their paymasters – might react more promptly to what they do with our money.
No, they have to dress it up in terms that editorial staff have to pick through and decipher. They know journalists are lazy, that they won’t scrutinise anything if it takes too much effort.
“At spatial scales below the regional level investigation has shown that annual figures are highly volatile and not robust. Information for local authorities and counties were therefore given as multi-year averages.”
I wonder whether the MP who wrote this, Iain Wright, had a clue what he was writing about. I have tried to decipher it again and again and I just can’t work it out (but then again, I don’t often understand the words any more anyway).
I thought that businessdictionary.com might help, so I looked up ‘spatial scales’ and ‘multi-year averages’. It didn’t have any suggestions.
George Orwell said in his famous essay ‘Politics and the English Language’:
“Political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
He also said that obscure writing is written by those who are not thinking clearly. But I suspect that politicians – and civil servants – know very well what they’re doing.
