Confessions

'I'm a graduate architect with a Masters degree and 6.5 years of teriary education and I would like to confess. I caught myself red-handed....

"[the] School was in a strong position to engage with briefing issues....[which in turn made it] easier to recognise ‘non-negotiable’ issues and constraints"

...and I'm sticking to it, because it is in a language my reader will think they understand!! I feel like a fraud!'

Sarah from St Kilda

Vale Barry Carter

We were truly saddened to learn of the death of Barry Carter and send our condolences to Barry's family and friends.

Barry wrote the wonderful 'Confession of a weaselwordholic' which was included in the 2006 Weasel Words Diary.

Hello, my name is Barry Carter and I’m a weaselwordholic.

I guess it all started when I was a manager in the public service. At first it was only the soft stuff, like the odd restructure or client service charter. There just didn’t seem to be any harm in it and everyone was doing it anyway. Before I knew it I had moved on to transparent processes, key drivers and then the hard stuff like balanced scorecards. By the end of the year I was dropping 4 or 5 caps of focus groups and corporate memory every day.

My staff began to shun me as my coherence diminished and I took to shuffling through the corridors of power, prostituting myself to get my next fix. This came at a terrible price. I was introduced to crack complexity resolution and was soon freebasing change management and process re-engineering. I was on a highway to hell without a key performance indicator to guide me.

One day, at a team strategy meeting, I noticed that all my staff appeared more attentive than usual and were making notes on pieces of paper in front of them. Some broke out into broad smiles as I spoke of our future directions. Then one shouted “Bingo” and held aloft his piece of paper. When they explained the way that “Wank Words Bingo” worked, I knew I had a problem.

I had a complete breakdown shortly after this and I was taken from my office babbling “I need to migrate from this model of challenging behaviour but I can’t leverage a sustainable exit strategy”. After many months of intensive therapy, which was largely free of negative patient outcomes, (other than the day the psychologist pulled a gun on me), I was able to rejoin society and begin to rebuild my life.

I've been clean now for almost three years, but every time I hear weasel words I feel those cravings deep inside. Sure, the Plain English Program the government put me on helps, but the withdrawal pains keep gnawing away. Every day I could gladly snort a couple of lines of action planning or stakeholder leveraging and end up right back in the gutter. This stuff is that dangerous! Please, keep up your good work as I don’t want any of our kids to end up like me.

The following is an extract from an obituary written by Barry's colleague, Michael Birt.

'Barry Carter had many passions, experiences and a way of getting things done in a practical way.

Barry joined WorkSafe in June 2001. Before that he'd worked as a merchant seaman, and in ship building. He loved telling stories because his life was littered with experiences that he shared and applied in the present.

He understood that there were consequences of poor performance in safety and that there were rewards for getting it right. This was acknowledged by a truck driver who once thanked him for pushing though guidance material that was part of a project to prevent falls from trucks.

The driver said he'd had a number of falls, a few more near misses, but thanks to Barry's work, no longer feared working on top of a truck. Thanks to Barry's practical and genuine approach fall protection on trucks is now standard across Australia.

Barry moved into forklift safety and again worked closely with industry to improve its understanding of the dangers of these machines and developed the guidance material that is one of his greatest achievements.

Barry was a man of many passions. He played guitar and recorded his own music, having began playing as a young man including in a band in the north of England around the time The Beatles were on the way up.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was his reading of choice and ‘The Who: Live at Leeds' was his favourite album.

One of his proudest moments was when the 2006 Weasel Words Diary was published by Don Watson. Barry's contribution to the diary was published as a ‘Confession'.

This is typical Barry. It reflects his humour and his style. He was totally chuffed to have it published.

Equally typical is a story from South Australia where he once had to deliver the news to farmers in the state's north that they now had to fence where their properties joined watercourses.

It was one of those cases where the law and reality didn't really come together.

He delivered the news to landholders at a public meeting which included one whose property included Lake Eyre. The grazier was suitably unimpressed. Lake Eyre's big.

Having done his duty and ever-helpful, Barry then sat down and helped them write to their local MP in a bid to get the regulation changed. '

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'In reading many of the submissions on your site I began to wonder where I may have been guilty of this in my own life.

I realized I have indeed been guilty of using this kind of language. I'd like to abandon this practice entirely (after previewing this, the word 'entirely' replaced 'wholesale'). "sigh" Alas, I cannot. I've found that using it sparingly causes those who adore this language to throw money at me. The following are examples of my transgressions, from my own resume, along with translation.

"Provide maximum availability of departmental user data" - Making sure people can get their stuff.

"Provide reporting process troubleshooting and resolution via established procedures and/or programmer notification and coordination." - Fixing broken stuff and calling for help when I can't.

For years I've avoided phrases like 'Soul searching', 'Touch Base' and 'Outside the Box', but you've enlightened me to the true extent of the problem. Thank you for your intervention. - Chad

'In the olden days, when I was an academic and we were restructured at least annually, I wrote many submissions,mission statements etc. in the expected language. Why didn't I write them in English?' - Robert Newton

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