December 13, 2006

• Heh, this is pretty funny. Germaine Greer: 'The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold.'
• I was once asked a few years ago why I didn't eat English food, like lasagne (I answered, of course, that I'm half Italian and know what it should taste like). I do sort of like, though, that English cuisine has become so poly-cultural that the various origins of so many dishes are lost in its embrace.
• The Naomi Campbell statement is a bit dim, but nobody could say it wasn't good clear English.
• From the linked site ... * Best National Newspaper: The Guardian The Guardian wins this award for the second year running, having continued to set the standard for national newspaper journalism. The pages are well designed and laid out, with good use of colour. On the whole, the language used is clear and accessible. The quality of free supplements and gifts remains excellent and the paper has one of the best news and features websites around. What the hell does "good use of colour" and "free supplements and gifts" have to do with their core concern? Naff, naff, naff. The writing on the site is plodding crap while we're at it, too.
• I wondered about the point of mentioning the supplements too. It's weird because the HM Prisons website has a statement and goes on about how esteemed the Campaign awards are. I initially included some snark about how the 's' in their FAQs is redundant, but decided I was too mature for that. Uh huh.
• Germaine had a fairly good response that I agreed with in large part, though she might be on a bit of shaky ground with the phrase that got her the gong. The Plain English lot have seem to have stepped away from their earlier remit of skewering incomprehensible management-babble in official and commercial publications and now seem to be doing a half-arsed version of Private Eye's Pseud's Corner instead. Feeding off knee-jerk English anti-intellectualism and more than a bit dull and pointless.
• I'm all for clear, succinct communication but usually where there's obfuscation there's fire, and railing against that is like killing the messenger. (Did that make any sense?) In other words, intellectuals (especially of the French-influenced variety) feel a need to distance their discourse from the common rabble's, as spoofed famously by Alan Sokal, just as much as politicians need to spin to push their agenda or save their own hides. Language is merely a tool in this instance, and focusing on just the language is like picking apart the lyrics of a white supremacist song without appreciating the bigger threat that it poses. But in many cases, the language is all we have, so... I guess I'm back to square one here. How about: what Abiezer_Coppe said! Short and sweet.
• Incomprehensible management-babble: Great Moments in Doublespeak [link at bottom]
• Pulling a famously dim supermodel up for something she said seems a little unfair. The Plain English Campaign win the Unclearest Logo Award. Hand-scribbled, doesn't copy, print, or reproduce well. They have a good remit though. As for English food, don't forget the Bedfordshire Clanger!
• Putting the Court Order or the Borough Notice on there is a bit misguided -- it's legalese, and perfectly acceptable and clear legalese (which has to be read as discrete units, and not as a comprehendable sentence). When it comes to the legal system, plain English creates a lot of problems through the confusion of references. You can't really unite plain English and legalese. And yes, I know people are going to cite Denning at me, but it's easy to tell the story part of a judgement in plain English, but the Order itself has to be phrased properly, and Denning was no different from anybody else in that. And if Courts operated in plain English, well, just anybody could do it then, right?
• Eh?
• *cites Denning at Captain Renault*
• Quiet, you...
• Maybe the Plain English people can hire the webmaster from hmprisons to spiff their own up. It's horrible.