Britain’s Plain English Campaign, has chosen this year’s winners of the Golden Bull, awarded for “the worst examples of written tripe.”
Among the recipients for 2008 was the financial services department at McGill University, for this priceless piece of gobbledygook:
This cycle will inherently deliver an incessant flow of process and systems assessment, improvement, and communication with the related development, distribution, and implementation of necessary tools, education, and support.
Also chosen, Scottish Life, for this response to an endowment policy query:
The growth of the policy is calculated through more than one area of the plan, the annual reversionary bonus is only one area of this growth, the part of the growth rate of this policy is the increased rates of the terminal bonus rate for a policy with a term of 24 years is currently 24% of the basic sum assured and the total bonuses attaching. The terminal bonus is only applied at the end of the plan and is not known to ourselves until this is applied.
And this little gem, from HM Revenue & Customs in a letter to a customer, is deceptively simple at first glance:
Thank you for your Tax Returns ended 5th April 2006 & 2007 which we received on 20th December. I will treat your Tax Return for all purposes as though you sent it in response to a notice from us which required you to deliver it to us by the day we received it.
Okay, that last one just made me laugh, because I deal with so many different government agencies, and that was just so…governmental.
Guvmint-speak is a whole nuther language. I wish I knew whether bureaucrats make it up as they go, or attend special classes to learn it.
It’s really embarrassing to be a writer working for the government… Occasionally people will ask for my help in, say, selecting one of two synonyms, or when something “just doesn’t sound right.” But it could be a full-time job (and I’d make a fortune from the overtime).
I hear you. I write for a sort-of, kind-of, branch of government, but it’s not quite that painful. Although I do get the anguished calls to “compose” a whole sentence for a press release or some such. How hard can it be to put a sentence together? The other side of the coin is when I’m asked to just kind of throw together a 45 minute keynote address … with a few hours’ notice, as happened today … I guess I could flatter myself that I make it all seem so easy … And yeah, I did “throw” the keynote together …