Links

'But the institution that wins the coveted convoluted-language award is the government—any government, in any country. A U.S. document speaks of “ground-mounted confirmatory route markers.” Translation: road signs.
John Leo, ' The Office of Assertion - Some thoughts on writing well', 21 May 2007 City Journal, New York (thanks Nick)

'A survey of the world of pretzeled language coming from the administration.'
Devil's Dictionary of the Bush Era, Tomdispatch, March 2005
Thanks to michaelangelica

Robert Fisk: This jargon disease is choking language
'There is something repulsive about this vocabulary, an aggressive language of superiority in which "key players" can "interact" with each other, can "impact" society, "outsource" their business - or "downsize" the number of their employees. They need "feedback" and "input". They think "outside the box" or "push the envelope". They have a "work space", not a desk ...'
The Independent, 13 January 2007 (thanks to Vinod)

George Orwell and 'Politics of the English Language'
http://whitewolf.newcastle.edu.au/..../essay/politicaandenglish.html

Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture, December 1993
'Be it grand or slender, burrowing, blasting, or refusing to sanctify; whether it laughs out loud or is a cry without an alphabet, the choice word, the chosen silence, unmolested language surges toward knowledge, not its destruction.'
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1993/morrison-lecture.html

The Gettysburg Powerpoint Presentation
'And now please welcome President Abraham Lincoln.
Good morning. Just a second while I get this connection to work. Do I press this button here? Function-F7? No, that's not right. Hmmm. Maybe I'll have to reboot. Hold on a minute. Um, my name is Abe Lincoln and I'm your president.' http://www.norvig.com/Gettysburg/

Dilbert Creator Fools Executives 'It's a crazy story of weasels (and cartoonists) run amuk: Scott Adams, the famous Dilbert cartoonist, posed as a management consultant and got a room full of managers to produce utter gibberish.' Click here (thanks to Jean McGuire)

Corporate Gibberish Generator Enter your company name and click "Generate" to generate several paragraphs of corporate gibberish suitable for pasting into your prospectus.
(The gibberish is geared more toward Internet and technology companies.)

'Your guide to the language of pseudoscience and fashionable nonsense. Written by woolly-thinkers for woolly thinkers. A must read for post-modernists, dialectical biologists, Gaia theorists and Freudians.' The Fashionable Dictionary

The Language Police: Gettin’ Jiggy with Frank Luntz by Nancy Snow: 'If you need any more confirmation that America is the numero uno propaganda nation, look no further than the GOP language maestro Frank Luntz, who has produced a memorandum of “The 14 Words Never to Use.” Thanks to the Internet and the blogosphere, we mere mortals can get our grubby mitts on what the conservative elite persuader Luntz is doing to scrub our brains free of individual thoughts.' Common Dreams [thanks to Phil Morgans]

The Republican Dictionary project. 'The key to their [republicans] linguistic strategy is to use words, which sound moderate to us but mean something completely different to their base. Their tactics range from the childish use of antonyms, i.e., "clean" = "dirty" to the pseudo-academic use of prefixes--"neo" is a favorite--to the pernicious (and very expensive) rebranding of traditional political labels-- "liberal"--as an insult. We need to break the code by building a Republican dictionary.'

Eric Shackle is a retired journalist whose hobby is searching the internet and writing about it. He is author of 'The World's First Multi-National e-Book' where he's written a story about us and the ferrets.

Tony Proscio, 'In Other Words: A plea for plain speaking in foundations' (http://www.emcf.org/pdf/inotherwords.pdf)
Tony Proscio, 'Bad Words for Good: How foundations garble their message and lose their audience' (http://www.emcf.org/pdf/badwordsforgood.pdf)

These works were produced through the Edna McConnell Clark [philanthropic] Foundation in the US, and their website has a page devoted to Jargon:http://www.emcf.org/pub/jargon/ [Thanks to Nina Bailey]

Edward R Tufte's essay: 'The Cognitive Style of PowerPoint'.
'In particular, the popular PowerPoint templates (ready-made designs) usually weaken verbal and spatial reasoning, and almost always corrupt statistical analysis. What is the problem with PowerPoint? And how can we improve our presentations?'
http://www.edwardtufte.com/tufte/powerpoint

The PowerPoint Anthology of Literature. Great works distilled to their essence and presented in the most efficient form of communication ever devised, by Daniel Radosh
http://www.radosh.net/writing/ppaol.html

The Email Disclaimer Awards 2001including the Most Incomprehensible Disclaimer. [thanks to Misha Charrett]

A PR Watch group in the US that includes 'Spin of the Day': www.prwatch.org Also includes 'Disinfopedia', sponsored by the Center for Media and Democracy: www.disinfopedia.org.

How to run a political campaign and write political speeches using clichés: PoliticalCliche.com
http://www.sportscliche.com/politics/

Dictionary.com - A dictionary and a thesaurus[thanks to Fiona Rae for the suggestion]

The Adventures of Action Item™ - Professional Superhero.
ACTION ITEM: I want to be sure we're all on the same page, Commissioner! Let's open a dialog on this project, so I can download your status.
COMMISSIONER: There's no time, Action Item! What are you going to do to save the city?
www.fatalexception.org

Mission Statement Generator at the Dilbert site

For independent news reporting:
www.truthout.org

News and Information for Ferret Lovers:
http://www.weaselwords.com