Officialese, bureaucratese, or governmentese is language that sounds official. It is the "language of

officialdom An official is someone who holds an office (function or Mandate (politics), mandate, regardless whether it carries an actual Office, working space with it) in an organization or government and participates in the exercise of authority, (either th ...

". Officialese is characterized by a preference for wordy, long sentences; a preference for complex words,

code words ''Code Words'' is an online publication about computer programming produced by the Recurse Center retreat community. It began publishing in December 2014, and has a quarterly schedule. The journal features original work by participants at the Cent ...

buzzwords A buzzword is a word or phrase, new or already existing, that becomes popular for a period of time. Buzzwords often derive from technical terms yet often have much of the original technical meaning removed through fashionable use, being simply used ...

over simple, traditional ones; a preference for vagueness over directness and a preference for

passive Passive may refer to: * Passive voice, a grammatical voice common in many languages, see also Pseudopassive * Passive language, a language from which an interpreter works * Passivity (behavior), the condition of submitting to the influence of o ...

over

active voice Active voice is a grammatical voice common in many of the world's languages. It is the unmarked voice for clauses featuring a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most other Indo-European languages. A ...

(some of those elements may, however, vary between different times and languages). 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. 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.

Ernest Gowers Sir Ernest Arthur Gowers (2 June 1880 – 16 April 1966) is best remembered for his book '' Plain Words,'' first published in 1948, and his revision of Fowler's classic '' Modern English Usage''. Before making his name as an author, he had a lon ...

noted that officialese also allows the user to remain vague. It can be used to make oneself understood to insiders while being hard to decipher by those unfamiliar with the

jargon Jargon is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The context is usually a partic ...

and subtexts used. Its use is known to put off members of the general public and reduce their interest in the material presented. Officialese has been criticized as making one's speech or prose "stilted, convoluted, and sometimes even indecipherable" and simply as the "cancer of language". It is thus more pejoratively classified as one of the types of

gobbledygook Gibberish, also called jibber-jabber or gobbledygook, is speech that is (or appears to be) nonsense. It may include speech sounds that are not actual words, pseudowords, or language games and specialized jargon that seems nonsensical to outside ...

. Its use can also result in unintended humorous incidents, and has been often

satirized Satire is a genre of the visual, literary, and performing arts, usually in the form of fiction and less frequently non-fiction, in which vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, often with the intent of shaming or e ...

. Several similar concepts to officialese exist, including ''genteelism'', '' commercialese'', ''

academese Academese is a term referring to unnecessary jargon associated with the field of academia, particularly common in academic writing in humanities, and is contrasted with plain language. The term is often but not always pejorative, and occasionally c ...

'', and ''

journalese Journalese is the artificial or hyperbolic, and sometimes over-abbreviated, language regarded as characteristic of the news style used in popular media. Joe Grimm, formerly of the ''Detroit Free Press'', likened journalese to a "stage voice": "We w ...

''. The existence of officialese has been recognized by a number of organizations, which have made attempts to curtail its use in favour of

plain language Plain language is writing designed to ensure the reader understands as quickly, easily, and completely as possible. Plain language strives to be easy to read, understand, and use. It avoids verbose, convoluted language and jargon. In many countr ...

References

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, https://www.jstor.org/stable/973061 {{Authority control Political terminology

See also

References

External links