How not to talk

George Orwell is best known for fiction warning about totalitarian tomorrows, but he also had a lot to say about abuse of language itself. His essay "Politics and the English Language" should be required reading in every high school.

The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing. As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated henhouse.

It's relevant to political prevarication, but also to general communication. Sometimes they're deliberately hiding something, and other times people speak and don't want to be remembered so they unconsciously fill in buzzwords rather than anything memorable.

Sometimes, though, there are so many buzzwords that their density is memorable all by itself. In a department-wide meeting last month, I found it funny just how vacuous the WMBD boss was. Some choice examples follow.

• When describing some audits due to happen this summer, he said it was supposed to be "in the August timeframe." To quote another part of Orwell's essay, "The inflated style itself is a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outline and covering up all the details." In this case I'd give the WMBD guy the benefit of the doubt. I don't think he was trying to obfuscate, it was perfectly clear what he meant, it was just a ridiculous way to say it. I just think he so rarely he has to make himself clear that he isn't in the habit of it. So "in August," or "in four months," became that farcical phrase.
• "I view audits as a learning opportunity." It's very hard to imagine a real person who could say that and mean it. That's sunny optimism of maybe literally the most implausible type - I could imagine a person being sunnily optimistic about sickening mass murder, because Ted Bundy and Nazis and Karl Rove and depraved people in general exist, but who could possibly be so sunnily optimistic about being subject to an audit? Call me overly cynical if you want but I'm pretty sure that's not how human minds work. Much more likely, using that phrase is polishing a turd.
• On the subject of interdepartmental communication, "there is sometimes a limited viscosity" of understanding. Information flows slowly like... like... like molten gold! It's a valuable treasure we should share as much as possible, except for the fact that it would messily kill anyone who had it dumped on their head! OK, this is a problem with analogies, but there's a problem with how he said it too. Why not just say "Communication could be better," or "It's not always easy to get through to each other," or "They don't listen to us?" Possible rudeness aside, any of those would have been much better than saying that understanding flows like slow-flowing liquids.
• About two computer systems our department is trying to get started, which apparently aren't working well together, he said, "We've got a divided household." Again, in this case I don't think the use of the cliche was intentional, because he probably didn't mean to call to mind Abraham Lincoln's house divided speech or Luke 11:17, because they don't end well. It's just that his mouth was moving and he wasn't thinking hard or quickly enough about what was coming out of it.