A deprived background made Chrissie Maher keenly aware of how uneducated people were fobbed off by officialese they couldn’t understand, and how they were often coerced into signing important documents and forms, with little idea about what the small print meant. When she came across a case in which an old lady died of hypothermia because she couldn’t understand the application form for a home heating grant, she decided to do something about it.
Maher launched the Plain English Campaign in 1979: since then, with its relentless exposure of bureaucratic pomp and absurdity, it has become both feared and admired. It prompted a government review which resulted in some 36,000 official forms being scrapped and another 60,000 rewritten to make them more easily understood. It is frequently hired by organisations to vet their forms and sales literature and issues a ‘Crystal Mark’ to commercial prose which passes its standards of clarity. To transgressors of simple English however, it issues its annual Golden Bull awards. Winners of this trophy – appropriately a pound of tripe – include the Department of Agriculture which defined cows, pigs and sheep as ‘grain-consuming animal units’, a car sales firm which described a used car as a ‘pre-enjoyed vehicle’, and the National Health Service for defining a bed as:
A device or arrangement that may be used to permit a patient to lie down when the need to do so is a consequence of the patient’s condition rather than a need for active intervention such as examination, diagnostic intervention, manipulative treatment, obstetric delivery or transport.
The more recent Plain Language Commission has identical objectives and issues its own annual awards – the Golden and Silver Rhubarb trophies for the year’s most baffling documents.
Both organisations waged a war of blunt words in 1995 when the Commission awarded NatWest Bank a silver trophy for what it called an example of the year’s worst gobbledegook in a booklet about mortgage rates, part of which read:
Depending upon the type of mortgage you have, repaying early can have certain financial consequencies [sic], for instance, early repayment of a mortgage and surrender of an endowment policy, may leave you with a small surrendering sum, which may not reflect the actual monies invested. Alternatively, cancellation of a life policy without considering future needs may ultimately mean increased premiums for the same amount of life cover in the future.
To the embarrassment of the Plain English Campaign, NatWest Bank had just been nominated for its ‘Crystal Clear Bank of Europe’ award for the ‘ease with which its literature could be understood’!
You may wonder, when the experts in concise, coherent communication disagree so profoundly, whether you will ever see the clear light of day through the other side of the jungle. But take heart and read on and you will learn how even the most dense thicket of verbiage can be trimmed and tamed.
If language can be like a jungle sometimes, officialese is the minefield laid among the thorny thickets and clinging creepers. And despite the successes of the Plain English teams, officials in government, local councils and other bureaucratic organisations still too often try to lure us into their baffling word mazes.
The language of officialdom can obliterate all meaning. Feel the undergrowth closing in as you try to fight your way out of this trap dug by the former Department of Health and Social Services . . .
The Case of the Crippled Sentence
A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses or if he would not be unable or virtually unable to walk if he habitually wore or used a prosthesis or an artificial aid which is suitable in his case.
This would-be ‘sentence’ first of all reflects the legalistic terror of official punctuation: the full stop or comma which, if misplaced, might lead the Department all the way to a House of Lords appeal. And, second, it ignores or offends half the population – women – by exclusively using the masculine pronouns he and his.
So let us take our machete to the undergrowth, bring in the mine detectors and wire-cutters, and try to discover what, if anything, this passage struggles to convey. A step at a time, too, for fear of booby traps.
A person shall be treated as suffering from physical disablement . . . treated?
This is not intended as medical advice, but since the context is medical the reader may, however briefly, be confused. Lift out treated and replace with considered. Throw treated into the shrubbery.
Suffering from physical disablement. Why not simply physically disabled? And while we are at it, we don’t need as after considered. Toss that into the shrubbery too.
So far, in our cleaned-up version, we have ‘A person shall be considered physically disabled’ – and we don’t seem to have lost any of the intended meaning.
Such that he is either unable to walk or virtually unable to do so. Wrench away the clumsy such that he is and replace it with which makes him (we’ll come to the offending pronouns later). Next, we cut out either, because we don’t need it.
We now have which makes him unable to walk, or virtually unable to do so. This can be more tightly expressed as which makes him, unable, or virtually unable, to walk.
Peering into the darkening thicket we next tackle if he is not unable or virtually unable to walk with a prosthesis or an artificial aid which he habitually wears or uses . . . Stop! The rest is just the gibbering of jungle monkeys. This seems to mean that the person can get around, but only with the help of a prosthesis or other artificial aid. The word even, before if he is not, would have helped. But we really do not need this tangled heap of words at all.
The entire ‘sentence’, if it means anything, must surely mean this:
A person is regarded as physically disabled if he or she always needs an artificial aid to walk.
We can of course replace the masculine and feminine pronouns with that person:
A person is regarded as physically disabled if that person always needs an artificial aid to walk.
As you can see, the meaning remains clear. But what about the prosthesis, you may ask. Well, there are thousands of people with prostheses in the form of replacement hips and knees and other artificial body parts who are bounding about without the least need of any artificial aids – wheelchairs, zimmers and walking sticks – so the amended versions are perfectly valid.
The Case of the Crippled Sentence is a prime example of the need to think ‘What do I want to say?’ And then to say it, the simple way.
A serious case of effluxion
Here’s a verbal smokescreen from a London borough council:
And take further notice that under the provisions of Section 47(2) of the said Housing Act 1974 in relation to any land consisting of or including Housing Accommodation in a Housing Action Area a landlord must not less than four weeks before the expiry by effluxion of time of any tenancy which expires without the service of any Notice to Quit, notify the council in writing that the tenancy is about to expire