More about Gobbledygook

IN A recent editorial in the Washington Post, the language of Big Government is described as seeping down from the higher echelons and executive levels into every-day talk. Sometimes, the writer says, we catch ourselves about to coordinate our intra-family affairs, or process a grocery bill, or activate the car, or implement one of our wife's directives. The passage is typical of the way most people feel about government language: they consider it a quaint and amusing dialect, characterized by the addiction to fivedollar words like activate or directive. To them, the cure of this harmless speech defect seems easy: simply strike out the highsounding words and replace them by simple synonyms. Or, as Mr. Maury Maverick put it in his now famous memorandum: Stay off gobbledygook language. It only fouls people up. Oddly enough, such exhortations never seem to have any effect. Bureaucrats go on using bureaucratic language, and even Mr. Maverick himself was recently caught redhanded-and red-faced-talking glibly about the implementation of something or other. What is the reason for this seemingly incurable habit? Is it something in the climate of Washington? Is it part of a plot hatched by New Dealers, as some people seem to believe? Or is it, as Donald Stone suspects, attempt to make administration sound mysterious, difficult, and complicated? Does it spring from the prevailing reverence attached to something 'technical'? Do officials think they will dignify their status, perhaps securing higher civil service classifications, if they place an impenetrable veil of words over their work

Political science · Leadership, Human Resources, Global Affairs

• On bullshit in cultural policy practice and research

  Open Access•Eleonora Belfiore•International Journal of Cultural…•2009

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