Woe! Cliché and jargon pollute the world

About 60 years ago George Orwell wrote a fine essay called “Politics and the English language” which was an attempt to explain why politicians’ speeches were so boring.

Nothing much has changed since, except that now almost everybody seems to have caught the politicians’ nasty habits

Orwell gave six rules for better writing, which included:

It you can cut a word out, do so.
Never use a long word if a short one will do.
Avoid cliché and jargon.

One of my clients is a compulsive jargon-meister. I keep reminding him of these simple rules - I even run a regular seminar for him on the subject - but it doesn’t help since he doesn't attend. Today he ruined my appetite for breakfast by sending me a piece that described someone as a “delivery vehicle”.

Then my old friend Glenmore Trenear-Harvey, bon viveur and intelligence expert, compounded the problem by sending me something so bad it is almost farcical. It is part of a message from the Henry Jackson society. Almost every word is a cliché.

It reads:

Choppy waters ahead for Brown

Gordon Brown's beleaguered government recently greenlit a new £4bn aircraft carrier project. However this should not detract from the fact that the British military remains chronically underfunded.

The nastiest thing in that, perhaps, is "greenlit" for "approved". The man who wrote it should be taken out and shot for vile, unnatural cruelty to the English language.

Want to save the environment?

I often quote Lord Salisbury, one of more lugubrious of Queen Victoria’s prime ministers, who said: “One thing long experience of life has taught me is that you never should trust experts.”

This maxim applies with special force to do-gooders.

Take recycling. Next time you see a piece bearing some pious message about “this was printed on recycled paper”, take the article in question and wipe your arse on it.

The processes (especially the bleaching) used to recycle are far more damaging to the environment than the alternative.

And I might add that for every tree used in Scandinavia to produce paper, two or three more are planted. It’s the law, and I imagine the same applies in Canada.

That’s just a snippet I learned from a printer the other day. It’s true.

The most damaging thing for the environment is the hot air produced by experts who fly at vast expense to exotic spots where they get together to pollute the surrounding area - and the minds of those who listen to them

Thieves, sloths and drones are out to get us

First, sorry about my spelling in the last piece. Besides having the intelligence of a cat, I have the manual dexterity of a two-bottles-of-tonic-wine drunk.

But second, let me ask you how you felt when you learned that the property slump means estate agents are closing down in the hundreds. Was it rather like the way people felt when it was announced Hitler had died?

I thought so.

What a bunch of villains. I am just having our flat valued for the divorce. It is about 800 square feet. Those thieving bastards at John D. Wood claim it will take 6 - 8 hours to do this job - and want to charge around £2,000. A blind man could do it in 20 minutes.

Meanwhile, I want to get some electricity reconnected at another property in Bristol. The people at British Gas employ Siemens to do this exacting task which takes about 10 minutes - and charge about £500 for doing so.

Well it would take ten minutes, except the idle sods went there, couldn't park easily and just left. Meanwhile I was paying for someone to sit there and wait all day. My P.A. has been on the phone for about three hours trying to get sense out of anyone about this.

I imagine the boss of British Gas gets paid a handsome six figure sum for this farcical incompetence. And likewise Gauleiter Siemens.

It's true. Shits do rise to the top.

Ever wondered just how very, very clever you are?

Me too.

And now I know, because last Sunday, just before I set out on a quick whiz to dio soine talks in Slovenia and the Czech Republic, my partner and her sister decided to subject me to an intelligence test.

It was one of those online things where you have a certain number of seconds to answer questions involving multiple choice. The sort of thing ten year olds (and Italian women, it seems) do in their sleep.

I took it and it did no good to my self-confidence at all. It turns out that I am about as stupid as you can get. I have the intelligence of a cat.

I suspect that is abiout as thick as you can be - though maybe they have lower categories for goldfish or centipedes.

My partner, conversely, got just about the highest marks you can get. She is as intelligent as a space man, apparently.

All this goes to show that I have been right all these years in claiming that my secret weapon as a marketer is innate stupidity.

Not even the most moronic customer is thicker than me. I really understand them, believe me.

Next Sunday I'm off again to Slovenia and Croatia.

You may reasonably ask why I am going back to the same country - Slovenia - again almost immediately. Well, what can you expect from a stupid sod like me?

Communism or capitalism? Not as much difference as you think

I’m running around Europe this month promoting a rather nifty new idea my partner had. You can see it at www.Eadim.com, if it’s up.

(That’s the first overtly commercial statement I have made here, I think - but don’t worry; you may not be in the market).

Anyhow we were both speaking in Bucharest on Thursday, where we had a chat with a most entertaining lady who runs a fulfilment house. Besides having a very interesting background – one quarter Turkish, two thirds Tatar, and being very funny - Ilchian Omer is also very smart.

She said something about one of our most-loathed species - bit, fat, dull, stupid, slothful clients – which I thought amazingly perceptive; at any rate, it hadn’t occurred to me.

“We have no trouble at all with them,” she said. “After all, we grew up under communism. They are exactly the same.”

This stuck me like a bolt of lightning.

Of course: it’s all amazingly slow, everyone is afraid of making decisions, they all have to consult someone else, there are about seventeen layers, endless meetings decide nothing, more concern with rules than results, promotion through arse-licking rather than merit, don’t rock the boat, stick around for your pension, toe the corporate/party line, screw the suppliers, the people at the top get all the perks, everyone else gets buggered around, the official language is incomprehensible, the boss goes around boasting in dull speeches, all his cronies are on the board, nobody except them really likes their job – identical.

That is the reason why despite the expected economies of scale, larger organisations don't work, and are often beaten by smaller, niftier ones where everyone knows everyone else. It is the reason why the U.S.army gets clobbered by guerrillas; it is the reason why the National Health Service (world's second largest employer after Indian railways) is a shambles.

Interestingly, Gordon Brown’s approach has always been communist – “ We know what to do with your money better than you do - and we'll waste it on things that don't work until one day everything falls to bits."

The best organisations trust their people. The worst don't. And it doesn't matter what the ideology is. People first!