tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6126042.post-1080432577658307752004-03-28T00:09:00.000Z2004-03-29T00:28:09.716+01:00 Good to see our friends at the Plain English Campaign grabbing some front-page publicity in the London papers with their hit list of today's most disliked cliches. Top of the list was "at the end of the day", closely followed by "at this moment in time". But some of the other words and phrases that were rightly fingered are much more subtly pernicious. We were pleased to see "epicentre" (used incorrectly), "bottom line" (used inexactly), "ongoing", "address the issue" and "going forward" named and shamed – not least because we hear or see them used, unblushingly, many times a day. We've always had a lot of time for the Plain English campaigners and their steady, persistent efforts to bully, cajole and persuade government and industry to care about saying things in clear and straightforward ways. But people in business often don't seem to realise how much they stand to gain from promoting their ideas or their products in lucid, understandable prose. In fact, there still seem to be a good few dinosaurs around who are convinced that pompous, opaque verbiage helps, by making them seem serious and clever. There was a rash of that sort of thing back in the 1970s, especially in the burgeoning IT industry, but we should have left that nonsense behind by now. We've got over nylon shirts, Ted Heath, the Austin Allegro (the only British car ever designed with a square steering wheel) and bubble-permed footballers. Surely we can just let the linguistic habits of that benighted decade die off, too. For those interested in fighting the good fight – either as amateurs or as professional editors – there is a long and useful list of bullshit-free phrases, The A-Z of Alternative Words, on the Plain English Campaign Web site. Many of the suggested substitutions will be second nature to most e-editors (delete "sufficient", insert "enough"; delete "on numerous occasions", insert "often"), but there are plenty more that most of us usually let through unchallenged. The point is not that the Plain English Campaign's substitutes should always be adopted, but that the words and phrases the list highlights should always be tested for aptness and relevance before they are allowed to pass into print. And if we don't exercise that sort of judgement, no-one else will. ianhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/00882602151850785568noreply@blogger.com