
Government communication is mostly a contradiction in terms. Leaders have abandoned anything like straight declarations of their opinions or their policies. They hose their replies to questions with torrents of ambiguity. When not deliberately ambiguous and slippery in reply, they adopt an even more callous manner when faced with questions they cannot furnish with glib reply.
The other recourse for political speech is to set underlings and aides, honed to literary numbness in the best communication studies, to work crafting documents of such monumental dullness and euphemism, pocked with acronyms and gobbledygook, that they are unintelligible to the human mind, an insult to the English language, and otherwise verbally depraved.
Most leaders, and most ministers, avail themselves of these cowardly arts. As we have multiplied the means of communication we have vastly diminished the purpose of communicating; to say what is meant, to be direct in reply, to respect inquiry by meaningful response.
However — and alert readers will have scented this three paragraphs back — a light flickers; out of this Stygian pit of dead English and greasy equivocation comes a singular government communication — a letter from a leader — that says what it means, says it with clarity and force, and even — this may be unlawful in political communications — has some fun in doing so.
[…]
See Also:
(1) $2 million prize to Tzeporah Berman should have stirred up a tidal wave of controversy