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1 December 2003
Donald Rumsfeld ‘honoured’ for confusing comments
United States Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has won Plain English Campaign’s annual ‘Foot in Mouth’ award for the most baffling statement by a public figure. And eight organisations have won ‘Golden Bull’ booby prizes for gobbledygook. But campaigners praised organisations dealing with health and social issues for producing particularly clear documents.
Broadcaster Fiona Bruce will host the Campaign’s 24th annual awards ceremony in London tomorrow (Tuesday 2 December) to mark Plain English Day. The Campaign is a pressure group fighting to get public information written in clear and straightforward language.
Mr Rumsfeld said in a press briefing, ‘Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’
Campaign spokesman John Lister said, ‘We think we know what he means. But we don’t know if we really know...’
Among those narrowly defeated by Mr Rumsfeld this year were Arnold Schwarzenegger (who said ‘I think that gay marriage is something that should be between a man and a woman.’) and Chris Patten (who said ‘Having committed political suicide, the Conservative Party is now living to regret it.’) Previous winners include Richard Gere, artist Tracey Emin and Alicia Silverstone.
The Golden Bull winners are JMC Airlines (now part of Thomas Cook), jungle.com, Lloyds Pharmacy, Marks and Spencer, SMEG, Standard Life, and Warburtons Bakers. There is also a Golden Bull for ‘The Social Fund Maternity and Funeral Expenses (General) Regulations’.
The Campaign also makes positive awards for clear documents. All six winners praised in the open ‘plain English’ category this year involve health or social issues.
The judges had a tough time choosing the Golden Bulls this year according to Campaign spokesman John Lister. ‘The pile of entries weighed in at around four pounds (almost two kilograms), and we had entries from Australia, Malaysia, Ireland, the United States and Botswana. We tried to keep the awards reasonably light-hearted this year and we picked winners to show the full range of linguistic offences, from cliches to jargon and from legalese to mistranslation.
‘The truly atrocious documents are becoming far less common, but unclear writing is still a major problem. Ordinary people are faced with gobbledygook and jargon every day and it just grinds us all down and makes our lives a little more miserable.
‘We’re appealing to all writers not only to use plain English wherever possible, but also to make sure they don’t overload people with unnecessary information. Official documents shouldn’t leave readers reaching for a dictionary and a packet of paracetomol.’
The Plain English Campaign: http://www.plainenglish.co.uk/
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