Death to Modifiers! Down with the Passive!

When, many years ago in college, I crashed on the stormy shores of calculus and realized that chemical engineering perhaps wasn't my optimum career choice, my selection of Linguistics as a major was an easy one. I loved words, enjoyed reading and writing, and was reasonably good at acquiring foreign languages...all skills (except for the foreign language part) that I got from my mother. Along with the love of words, though, came a lifelong nails-on-the-chalkboard reaction to the abuse and misuse of language.

Thus, I'm in a bad job.

A large part of my work involves reading and commenting on work done by others - mostly plans of one sort or another, or analytical works on particular topics. No matter how good the fundamental ideas of most of these documents may be, they are generally written in Early 21st Century Bureaucratese, a language similar to but more convoluted than Old Church Slavonic. There are a lot of arcane grammatical rules in Early 21st Century Bureaucratese, but the major ones are these:

1. Use lots of modifiers.

2. Use the passive voice to obscure responsibility.

I've been working my way through the review of a programming plan intended to guide the establishment of a new organization. It includes gems like these:

"... (individuals will) take appropriate action to ..." I suppose this is necessary, because otherwise people would certainly take inappropriate actions; for instance, in order to ensure that the new organization had sufficient personnel to operate, they might direct that all interior doors of the building be painted purple (This, of course, could happen if the building in question was located in the district of a powerful Member of Congress who received hefty campaign contributions from the Purple Paint Manufacturers League, but that's another issue).

"... Information will be provided in a variety of effective media ..." This admonition is clearly warranted, for otherwise people would spend lots of public relations money providing information in ineffective media; for instance, reaching out to radical militant Muslims through articles in the Jewish World Review. You never know.

And so I say, Death to Modifiers! Just say what you mean, without trying to pad the word count.

Likewise, Down with the Passive Voice! If you know who is supposed to do something, just come out and say it:

"... action will be taken to establish a functioning headquarters ..." Whose head will be on a pike outside the front door if this action, whatever it is, isn't taken? What action is to be taken? And, of course, by all means don't establish a non-functioning headquarters (that's already been done by the DC City Government and the Virginia Department of Motor Vehicles).

As the late William F. Buckley was once famously quoted as saying: "Eschew obfuscation."

It's not easy being a linguistic purist. But somebody has to blow the BS horn every once in a while, and if it's not The Language Guy, it might as well be me.

Have a good day. More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo