- " Among the favourites in her U.S.
collection are calling the unemployed 'involuntarily leisured' and labelling
refugees as 'ambient non-combatant personnel.'
-
- LONDON (Reuters) - Two ``Plain English'' campaigners have embarked on
a worldwide crusade to teach bureaucrats to abandon gobbledegook. ``Language
policemen'' John Wild and George Maher flew out on Wednesday from London
to India, their first stop on a global mission to clear the linguistic
fog that so often envelops English. Next in the month-long tour will be
South Africa where the campaigners rewrote the country's bill of rights
and helped people understand what the law was all about. Then come the
worst offenders -- the United States -- where the campaigners complained
that poor Americans are known as fiscal underachievers and the Pentagon
describes bombs as vertically deployed anti-personnel devices.
The Plain English Campaign was founded in 1971 by Chrissie Maher who only
learned to read and write at the age of 14. Her jargon watchers have pounced
on verbal excesses by officialdom, given annual awards for surfeits of
verbiage and staged classes for bureaucrats, bankers and lawyers. The message
has now gone global with John Wild and Chrissie's son George embarked on
a whistle-stop tour. ``We got lots of letters from the poorest parts of
India asking 'What about a Plain English campaign here?' So we have taken
up the gauntlet,'' Chrissie Maher told Reuters. ``Their bureaucratic language
is worse than ours. What we left behind is something archaic,'' she complained.
``Ordinary people have to struggle with it all the time.'' ``He was conveyed
to his place of residence in a state of alcoholic intoxication'' was one
newspaper lead cited as a typical example of long-winded Victorian English.
``50 killed in mishap,'' read one headline that was a master of understatement.
``We raised 40,000 pounds ($68,130) to send a lawyer to South Africa to
help rewrite their bill of rights. People complained they couldn't even
understand it,'' she said. But Maher concentrates her greatest anger on
Americans for murdering the English language. ``'Involuntary rowback to
idle' is their expression for an engine cutting out. 'Negative patient
care outcome' means you drop dead. They are to blame for stupid things
like that.
People think they are from another planet,'' she said. Among the favourites
in her U.S. collection are calling the unemployed 'involuntarily leisured'
and labelling refugees as 'ambient non-combatant personnel.' But the message
amid all the more riotous examples of verbose officialdom is a serious
one -- cumbersome bureaucracy and red tape can cripple government agencies,
hospitals and the legal system. ($1-.5871 British Pound)
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