The Elements of Bureaucratic Style

The linked piece offers a more detailed but also concise breakdown of how to do this:

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/an-interactive-guide-to-...

Stick around for the (genuine) statement from a police department at the end, and its translation.

Passive voice is a key element: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mistakes_were_made

Actually I'll defend this construction.

Calling it an "officer-involved shooting" (should have a hyphen!) in an initial report restricts the scope to a just-the-facts-as-we-know-them-m'am style. Even from the headline I know: 1> where (Fremont), 2> Fatality, 3> cop was there. Hopefully the first paragraph tells me who shot whom and some macro facts.

But in an early article or "hot take" it's rarely clear if, for example, a cop used excessive force, or poorly pressured someone under stress so they took their own life; if there was legitimate responsibility etc. The passive voice here preserves the "innocent until proven guilty" position.

If the cop is later convicted of murder I would hope that a subsequent news article would be more definite ("officer XXX convicted of murder") or alternatively "Letter: distraught father wanted suicide to be a spectacle"

In fact this is why I am generally uninterested in "news" -- the amount of actual data in these early articles is usually quite small. If people are still talking about it a week later, perhaps it's worth learning about.

I am quite good at "corporate speak" when i need it. I tend to use when i want to be really vexing for the receiver.

In general, i begin with "what i want to say" and then i generate the smoothest way to explain it in a sentence, without anything that someone could "grasp" on.

It tends to be enough. So i don't think i ever think in corporate speak. I just try to use my imagination.

So in other words, it boils down to the usual human "I heard some cool new phrase in my in-group, I'm gonna start using it"?

Agree. A deep dive. Mission-critical, process-driven accountability. Address the action items at our next one on one.

> Consulting companies and CEOs try to one-up each other, perhaps unconsciously, who can come up with and then own the coolest new term.

This is an interesting example of a euphemistic treadmill. Corporate-speak has to change because each cool new term (e.g. downsizing) eventually gets poisoned by what it actually describes.

For a dysphemistic treadmill: "bleeding edge" was originally satire about the pain of being "past the cutting edge", but it gets used sincerely to describe new projects and even advertise startups. At this point it's so unremarkable that Programming Sucks had to use "hemorrhaging edge" to get the same effect.

More interesting question - since bureaucratic style is meant to shield blame, i.e. to put the situation into words such that the primary actors are put in a semantic position outside the scope of direct blame, then do the people who write in that style start thinking in it, and then do they stop being able to perceive themselves as the direct cause of events, to some extent? Language shapes thought to some extent, so if you use blameless language, do you start thinking of yourself as not responsible for anything?

I just wanted to point out that your 2 examples are manifestations of different phenomena:

>One of the most active sources of new terms is apparently layoffs. Consulting companies and CEOs try to one-up each other, perhaps unconsciously, who can come up with and then own the coolest new term.

(1) euphemisms for negative events like "layoffs"/"firings" into "downsizing", "rightsizing", "resource actions", etc. Same situation as using "unintended targets", "collateral damage", etc for civilian deaths in war.

>"Hmm, I kinda like how so and so used the term 'circling back' I'll start using it too, it just seems so fresh and cool.

(2) phrases of "social graces" such as "circling back", "reaching out", "touch base" instead of the blunt tonality of "I will call you", "I will notify you", "Be prepared for me to be back at your desk a little later for your answer", etc. It's fascinating that this language lubrication to not make other people not feel like they are at our beck & call has been happening forever. If it was 200 years ago, I suppose one person might hand a note written on a piece a paper to a servant, and then the servant then passes that paper to the target's servant, and finally the target's servant gives the paper to the target. It seems like reinvention of phrases like "circling back" are recreating this non-threatening version of "we will be communicating later".

I understand that people can be irritated with both examples. However, (1) is more about dishonesty and deflection where (2) is just human grooming and ego preservation.

I think a lot of people miss the important distinction between jargon and buzzwords.

Jargon: special words or expressions that are used by a particular profession or group and are difficult for others to understand.

Buzzword: a word or phrase, often an item of jargon, that is fashionable at a particular time or in a particular context.

A lot of these "corporate-speak" terms that are easy to poke fun at are jargon created to describe very specific, nuanced ideas within a professional group - they make communication easier. Then maybe the popular ones get used more broadly as buzzwords, by people who don't really know what they're talking about, and then it becomes assumed that anyone using that term doesn't know what they're talking about -- a huge disservice to the original creators of the jargon term, who coined it because they needed a word or phrase for nuanced communication with each other.

In my old management consulting job, we used this kind of jargon all the time. We knew it was jargon, many (but not all) of us never spoke like that in our personal lives. But at work, it helped us be more effective communicators.

Low-hanging-fruit is an example - does anyone have a shorter way of describing the idea? Sometimes we called them "easy wins", but that's as jargon-y as anything else I've heard.

Except for especially insidious cases: https://m.imgur.com/UUCWStu

I think that often, this speech is the result of how the perpetrators felt.

They are thrust into a situation, fall back to training that says 'just follow the rules / orders'. In that frame of mind, they indeed had no choice. Had they taken any other action, they'd have gone against policy as a simple lowly employee. That is terrifying and thus not an option.

> ... the outcome of a system designed so that nobody has responsibility.

Ironically, you said that in the passive voice, which hides the question of who designed the system that way.

I find myself dissapointed your comment was short. Great read.

<this reincarnation of nationalism is about trying, somehow, to design a new Dream

American dream was defined by the media, to me. Nationalism was defined by my mother telling what it was like in 1941. I could not believe that men and women would actually sign up for war, as they did then. Everybidy did, she said.

From my ears of viEtnam and tent-cities and matches the last thing that was was nationalism.

So if this new theory of AD is elusive too, then perhaps nationalism-as-dream will be realized by a portion of the citizenship.

that comment strike me as odd too - the terms "active and passive voice" are due to the passivity or activity of the speaker in the events being described. It has absolutely nothing to do with gender. If they were called "masculine and feminine voice" to correspond to the same then the author would have a case.

> Contains no passive voice.

Passenger is used as the subject, rather than object in your quoted passage. To see it in active voice, change "one of the passengers was politely asked...", to "SOME_SUBJECT politely asked one of the passengers...".

I've oversimplified, since it could be argued as active by adding the word "who",

"one of the passengers who was politely asked to deplane refused..."

but even if that's the case, then the master dodge phrase "it became necessary" cut SOME_SUBJECT from the second part. Note that the passenger is not doing the contacting in

"...and it became necessary to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help."

That statement contains a ton of passive voice.

Here's the active voice version, for contrast:

"We needed to contact Chicago Aviation Officers to help because the passenger unfortunately compounded the situation by refusing to deplane after we politely asked him to do so."

Notice that in the original statement, all humans have been moved from subjects to objects, mere instruments of authoritative concepts like "the situation" and "[what is] necessary".