Collins Improve Your Writing Skills - Graham King

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oddly enough

       of course

      of necessity (instead of necessarily)

       on the basis of

       once and for all

       one and the same

       precious few

       quite

       quite simply

       really

       rest assured

      say nothing of (as in to say nothing of last year’s results . . .)

      shall I say (as in it is, shall I say, a novel approach . . .)

       so much the better, so much the worse

      the fact of the matter (as in The fact of the matter is, the Government is wrong, a form commonly used by politicians for the claim I hope to get away with . . .)

       to all intents and purposes

       to my mind, to one’s own mind

       to the point that

      unless and until (as in unless and until they pay, they can’t board the ship. Either word makes the necessary condition, so one of them is redundant.)

      when all is said and done (not entirely meaningless but perhaps better replaced with still/however/nevertheless)

       with all due respect, with the greatest respect

       within the foreseeable future

       y’know?

      Here’s a sentence which includes three witter phrases:

       Needless to say, we are, if you like, facing difficulties which, when all is said and done, we did not create ourselves.

      The sheer lack of meaning in those phrases becomes more obvious when we find we can move them around the sentence, with no perceivable effect:

       We are, if you like, facing difficulties which, needless to say, when all is said and done, we did not create ourselves.

      Or:

       When all is said and done, we are, if you like, facing difficulties which, needless to say, we did not create ourselves.

      Without the witter words the sentence is more forceful, half as long, and has not lost any of its meaning: We are facing difficulties which we did not create ourselves.

      The second ingredient of gobbledegook is waffle; vague and wordy utterances that wander aimlessly along a path of meaning but effectively obscure it. In its extreme form it’s called verbal diarrhoea or, more correctly, logorrhoea. When you combine this affliction with a good helping of witter words and a tendency to tangle your syntax the result is total obfuscation, or gobbledegook.

      The former US President George Bush was an acknowledged master of gobbledegook – of using language (perhaps not intentionally, given his difficulties with English), not to reveal, but to obscure. Here he is, chatting with one of the astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis: ‘How was the actual deployment thing?’ he asks. And again, this time in full flow when asked if he would look for ideas on improving education during a forthcoming trip abroad:

       Well, I’m going to kick that one right into the end zone of the Secretary of Education. But, yes, we have all – he travels a good deal, goes abroad. We have a lot of people in the department that does that. We’re having an international – this is not as much education as dealing with the environment – a big international conference coming up. And we get it all the time, exchanges of ideas. But I think we’ve got – we set out there – and I want to give credit to your Governor McWherter and to your former governor, Lamar Alexander – we’ve gotten great ideas for a national goals programme from – in this country – from the governors who were responding to, maybe, the principal of your high school, for heaven’s sake.

      In 1944, a Texas congressman named Maury Maverick became so angry about the bloated bureaucratic language in memos he received that he described it as ‘gobbledegook’. Explaining the name he said it reminded him ‘of an old turkey gobbler back in Texas that was always gobbledy-gobbling and strutting around with ludicrous pomposity. And at the end of of this gobble-gobble-gobble was a sort of a gook’. Maverick was also the head of a federal agency, and promptly issued an order to all his subordinates: ‘Be short and say what you are talking about. Let’s stop pointing up programs, finalizing contracts that stem from district, regional or Washington levels. No more patterns, effectuating, dynamics. Anyone using the words activation or implementation will be shot’.

      Half a century later it seems that the Maverick Edict has had little effect. The art world certainly never heard of it:

       The spontaneous improvisation of trivial and fictional roles means a frame for social and communicative creativity which, by going beyond mere art production, understands itself as an emancipated contribution towards the development of newer and more time-appropriate behavior forms and a growth of consciousness . . .

      Studio International, 1976

      In a fit of liberalism you may excuse such babblings because writing about art is often incomprehensible anyway. But it is harder to excuse organisations supposedly dedicated to the art of human communication. Here is an extract from the Stanford University Press catalogue (1994) touting a forthcoming title called Materialities of Communication, edited by Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K Ludwig Pfeiffer:

       Converging with a leitmotiv in early deconstruction, with Foucauldian discourse analysis, and with certain tendencies in cultural studies, such investigations on the constitution of meaning include – under the concept ‘materialities of communication’ – any phenomena that contribute to the emergence of meaning without themselves belonging to this sphere: the human body and various media technologies, but also other situations and patterns of thinking that resist or obstruct meaning-constitution.

      Of course, to the normal person the first few words of a passage like this flash warning signs of impenetrability; to proceed would be to enter a mental maze from which there is no escape. But not all gobbledegook is that obliging. Much of it can entice you all the way through a wide and welcoming thoroughfare until, at the very end, you realise you are in a blind alley.

      All the examples quoted in this chapter are real although it may seem at times that some genius made them up. Let them be a warning! Next time you are tempted to lapse into what reads or sounds like gobbledegook, remember that Texas turkey.

       The increase in £M3 was approximately equal to bank lending plus the PSBR minus net sales of gilt-edged securities other than sales to the banks themselves.

      Nigel Lawson, The View from No. 11, 1992

       . . . the cognitive-affective state characterized by intrusive and obsessive fantasizing concerning reciprocity of amorant feelings by the object of the amorance.

      US sociologist’s definition of love, 1977

      Most people recognise jargon when they see it: words and phrases that may have begun life within a particular circle of people, trade or profession, but which spread among others who merely wish to appear smart

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