Government Language Utilization: the Tower of Babel Resurrected
Richard L. Predmore
A 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. I was stationed in Montana, where I wrote and edited documents involving federal land management and especially the federal coal leasing program. Having read for twelve years freshman themes and the prose of educationists and college administrators, I thought my linguistic sensibilities were utterly benumbed. But I was shocked to discover that the Tower of government Babel was more stupefying than any other yet experienced. 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. To preserve sanity, an intellectual thinks, or tries to. 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.
What first strikes one about writing in the government is its voluminous quantity. English teachers sometimes complain about a profession that requires countless hours rereading interminable novels by Melville and Thackeray. But picture the grim-faced, glassy-eyed bureaucrat hunched over a deskful of Xeroxed government papers. Pray for him and rejoice that thy poverty has spared thee such a fate.
