Beware 'innovation' space-cadets

Writer George Orwell's advice was to "never use a long word where a short one will do".

George Orwell warned of language ‘designed to make lies sound truthful’. I warn of gobbledegook.

Listening to officialdom can be dangerous for the health. A Health Ministry flunky interviewed on Radio New Zealand National's Morning Report a few weeks ago was enumerating the steps the ministry was taking to encourage people to quit smoking. Specifically, she was talking about things they were doing that they had not been doing before.

Now, if you are anything like me, you are probably thinking that the ideal word to describe those things is "new", but if so, you are simply revealing how out of touch you are.

The flunky in question, who is doubtlessly well paid (by which I mean she is compensated with a remuneration package commensurate with her skill level and proportionate to her peers in the private and public spheres) was certainly not going to stoop to a miserable three-letter monosyllable to describe the initiatives that she and her team had developed.

These measures were not just new: they were things being done "in the innovation space".

Now, unless there is an actual room in the Health Ministry building that is called "The Innovation Space" (which is, I regret to say, by no means impossible) this is a piece of gobbledegook that boldly goes where no bureaucrat has gone before.

The bureaucrat concerned is showing how in tune she is with the zeitgeist, of course. Circumlocution has become the primary mode of public discourse, either for the purposes of outright dissembling, or to make something sound much better than it is.

In a column a year ago, I took Wilson Parking to task for hiking their flat-fee evening rate in the city from $8 or $12 to $25 when the opera and the symphony orchestra were both on. The company ignored my requests for an interview but produced a statement that said prices had been "positioned slightly higher" than normal.

Now, in order to describe raising prices by 108 or 212 per cent as positioning them slightly higher you need either to be seriously deluded or attempting to pull the wool over someone's eyes. Conceivably, you could be both.

What Wilson meant was "we charged double or treble because we could and if you don't like it, tough". And what they meant when they said the top dog was too busy to talk to me was that I could get stuffed. It does not serve the interests of virtual monopolies to respond to public criticism. And it certainly does not serve their interests to say what they mean.

The great English writer George Orwell, whose Animal Farm most of us read at school, was a master of clear, simple and forceful prose. In his famous 1946 essay Politics and the English Language he referred to language "designed to make lies sound truthful ... and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind".

It is a description he surely would have applied to the inflated utterances of the parking operator and the bureaucrat. The English language, he wrote, "becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts".

When your phone call is answered by a recorded voice saying "your call is important to us", do you feel chuffed that they would regard you with such affection and respect? Of course you don't. You know that the phrase is code for "this service is understaffed, you're probably ringing to complain and we are hoping that you will get tired of waiting and hang up".

I had a courier company email me last week to tell me that a parcel being sent to me was on the way. Quite what use such a notification is eludes me, but when they described their email as a "pre-alert advisory", I had to go and have a lie down at the sheer inanity of it all.

This is more than the quibble of an old pedant, which I have, quite accurately, been accused of being. We should all listen carefully to the choice of words of political and commercial interests. Those who ignore Orwell's instruction to "never use a long word where a short one will do" are almost certainly trying to put one across you. Treat them with suspicion.

This, my 145th column in this spot, is my last. Thanks to all those who have written, either to tell me that I wrote something worth reading or that I don't know my arse from my elbow. Both responses have been appreciated.