Officialese
- Not to be confused with official language, a language that is given a special legal status in a particular country, state, or other jurisdiction..
Officialese or bureaucratese[1][2] is a derogatory[3] term for language that sounds official.[4] It is the "language of officialdom".[5] Officialese is characterized by a preference for wordy, long sentences; a preference for complex words, code words or buzzwords over simple, traditional ones; a preference for vagueness over directness and a preference for passive over active voice[4][6] (some of those elements may, however, vary between different times and languages[7]). The history of officialese can be traced to the history of officialdom, as far back as the eldest human civilizations and their surviving official writings.[8]
Officialese is meant to impress the listener (or reader) and increase the authority (more than the social status) of the user, making them appear more professional.[5][4] Ernest Gowers noted that officialese also allows the user to remain vague.[4] It can be used to make oneself understood to insiders while being hard to decipher by those unfamiliar with the jargon and subtexts used.[9] Its use is known to put off members of the general public and reduce their interest in the material presented.[10] Officialese has been criticized as making one's speech or prose "stilted, convoluted, and sometimes even indecipherable"[4] and simply as the "cancer of language".[2] It is thus more pejoratively classified as one of the types of gobbledygook.[1][3] Its use can also result in unintended humorous incidents, and has been often satirized.[4]
Several similar concepts to officialese exist, including genteelism, commercialese, academes and journalese.[4] The existence of officialese has been recognized by a number of organizations, which have made attempts to curtail its use (see Plain Language Movement).[3][8][11]
See also
- Bureaucracy
- Business speak
- Jargon
- Legalese
- Manual of style
- Humphrey Appleby – a fictional character noted for his extremes in officialese
References
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 2.0 2.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
- ↑ Lua error in package.lua at line 80: module 'strict' not found.
External links
- J Renkema, On functional and computational LSP analysis: the example of officialese
- More about Gobbledygook, Rudolf FleschPublic Administration Review Vol. 5, No. 3 (Summer, 1945), pp. 240–244, http://www.jstor.org/stable/973061
