Bureaucratic Language Quotes

The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details. The great enemy of clear language is insincerity.

Law Number IX: Acronyms and abbreviations should be used to the maximum extent possible to make trivial ideas profound ... Q.E.D.

You wouldn't want Alan Greenspan to write the instructions for assembling a beach chair.

Muddy language is not confined to policies alone. Each of you has seen replies to simple questions in which the meaning was lost through hopelessly obscure wording. When a person writes to the Veterans Administration, he is entitled to an easily understood, frank, and courteous reply. If our replies cannot be understood, they are not only not worth writing, but they simply create additional work.

Just read the farm relief bill. It's just a political version of Einstein's last theory. If a farmer could understand it, he certainly would know more than to farm. He would be a professor at Harvard.

Our everyday language has become encumbered, Germanic, artificial, bureaucratic, inorganic. It may not be exaggerated to say that by now American writers face but two alternatives: write English, or write gobbledygook.

The true bureaucrat is a man of really remarkable talents. He writes a kind of English that is unknown elsewhere in the world, and an almost infinite capacity for forming complicated and unworkable rules.

I don't like this official/unofficial distinction. It sound, er, officious.

The moment people talk of "implementing" instead of "doing," and of "finalizing" instead of "finishing," the organization is already running a fever.

No one who has read official documents needs to be told how easy it is to conceal the essential truth under the apparently candid and all- disclosing phrases of a voluminous and particularizing report.

Legislative language is governed by a law of etymology that is also the ancient code of the bureaucracy: It doesn't have to be right, it just has to be close enough for government work. If they understand what you mean, it doesn't matter what you say or how you say it.

It's one thing about insurance, that's a Washington term.