Guru

On the subject of the use of language, Guru received the following press release from T-Mobile (which has a fog index of 9.5):

Who would have thought that Donald Rumsfeld, Alicia Silverstone and Germaine Greer have something in common? According to new research commissioned by T-Mobile, all three have confused people by the way they’ve spoken.

A list of good and bad uses of the English language by public figures has been compiled by Professor David Crystal, one of the world’s foremost language experts, to encourage T-Mobile store staff to explain things simply when talking to customers.

One of the worst offenders is Donald Rumsfeld with his ‘known knowns’ speech: “The message is that there are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say there are things that we now know we don't know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we don't know we don't know. So when we do the best we can and we pull all this information together, and we then say well that's basically what we see as the situation, that is really only the known knowns and the known unknowns. And each year, we discover a few more of those unknown unknowns.”

Professor David Crystal commented: “We’re not intending to criticise the sentiment of the people that we’ve quoted. In fact, the famous Rumsfeld quote is a complex thought which is actually expressed by the words; but he makes the listener do all the work. What is the difference between clear and unclear English usage? Short words and short sentences help, because they make language easy to remember."

In contrast, 50 years on, Winston Churchill’s famous quote “I like short words” is still seen as the epitome of excellent ‘plain-speaking’, along with other straight talking quotes from John Paul Getty, Arthur C Clarke and even Bill Gates.

Posters with Professor Crystal’s examples of good and bad language are being distributed to T-Mobile stores across the country to display in staff rooms to help remind employees to get rid of jargon and say it like it is.

Phil Chapman, T-Mobile, said: “We know customers don’t understand all the jargon that comes with technology so we’ve been working to stamp it out since the beginning of the year. Our retail staff have undergone intensive training on how to speak to customers in plain English. These posters just remind them of the simple rules of ‘plain speaking’ and the things to avoid each time they talk to our customers.”

The full list of good and bad quotes is available on the T-Mobile ‘Quotation Marks’ blog, where T-Mobile wants customers to submit their own true life examples of dodgy English use.

Chapman continued: “We want to stamp out gobbledygook, so if anyone has seen or heard anything, let us know and we’ll do our best to decipher it for them.”

Good usage:

"I like short words." Winston Churchill

"The Internet is becoming the town square for the global village of tomorrow." Bill Gates

"The best way to solve any problem is to remove its cause." Martin Luther King

"If you can actually count your money, you are not really a rich man." John Paul Getty

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." Arthur C Clarke

Bad usage:

"I think that 'Clueless' was very deep. I think it was deep in the way that it was very light. I think lightness has to come from a very deep place if it's true lightness." Alicia Silverstone

"The time is right to embed honest, hard-edged self-evaluation across the system, which needs to be data-rich and workload light." David Milliband

"The first attribute of the art object is that it creates a discontinuity between itself and the unsynthesised manifold." Germaine Greer

"Semantic web: the web of data with meaning in the sense that a computer program can learn enough about what the data means to process it." Tim Berners-Lee