The government particularly is “into” these little expressions in a big way. This is especially true of American English, which every few years fills a new bucket of idioms built with Protean Prepositions. Throughout the history of the English language, the stock for prepositions has been going steadily up. With government diction, one commonly meets the Protean Preposition. The “bottom line,” as we say in the bureaucracy, is that our writing is as bland as a drink of warm water. Except for the weariest of clichés, metaphors are forbidden. It also safely sticks to the general and the abstract, shunning the specific and concrete. Furthermore, government writing is highly qualified, with cautious provisos for every contingency. To begin with a general description, government writing is wordy, repetitious, and redundant, sometimes all in the same passage. The problems with government writing go beyond volume and far beyond strict grammar, which can be quite correct. Pray for him and rejoice that thy poverty has spared thee such a fate. But picture the grim-faced, glassy-eyed bureaucrat hunched over a deskful of Xeroxed government papers. English teachers sometimes complain about a profession that requires countless hours rereading interminable novels by Melville and Thackeray. What first strikes one about writing in the government is its voluminous quantity. And so I’ve set about examining the way people in government use language and why they do it that way, a process that follows full circle from the comic to the tragic. To preserve sanity, an intellectual thinks, or tries to. My shock derived, I think, from realizing that grownups were doing this writing and that they were doing it presumably to further the business of our nation. But I was shocked to discover that the Tower of government Babel was more stupefying than any other yet experienced. Having read for twelve years freshman themes and the prose of educationists and college administrators, I thought my linguistic sensibilities were utterly benumbed. I was stationed in Montana, where I wrote and edited documents involving federal land management and especially the federal coal leasing program. An English teacher wanting to break the classroom routine and to experience what is billed as the “real” world, I accepted for a year a temporary appointment as a writer/editor for the Department of Interior.
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