Plain English Campaign goes for cheap headlines
This year’s Plain English Campaign Foot in Mouth Award went to Steve McClaren, the former England football coach, for ‘He (Wayne Rooney) is inexperienced, but he’s experienced in terms of what he’s been through.’
Oh how we laughed. But we know what McClaren meant and there’s a big difference between a comment spoken in haste on live radio and the carefully crafted written words we expect to find in, say, Nestlé’s exploration of the challenges faced in green sauce manufacture:
‘“Green Sauces” are an important product group for Buitoni Pesto Basilico. Their quality and flavour profile are enhanced by the basil used in production. However, Buitoni faced sensory profile reproducibility problems due to heterogeneous raw material, challenging the production of uniform quality.’
And as Artisan’s Rob Baker points out, last year’s winner Naomi Campbell (‘I love England, especially the food. There’s nothing I like more than a lovely bowl of pasta.’) isn’t bad English, but stupidity.
The winner isn’t the celebrity with the weakest grasp of English, but the one with the greatest ability to secure headlines.
But to be fair, the trick works. Because while all the coverage leads on the dopey footballer or model, the genuine examples of gobbledegook soon follow.
Comments (One comment)
Stephen,
contrived and unintelligible English is not restricted to the present or even education. Have a look at George Orwell’s piece on how to write and the examples of poor writing he uses to illustrate his points.
Rob
Rob Artisan / December 16th, 2007, 5:28 pm / #
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