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If you wondered why people’s eyes glaze over when the fifth and the 21st letters of the alphabet come together, take a read of this. “Building a strong professional sense of camaraderie among practitioners of journalism should be a major concentration, especially during an era in which media moguls are leading a transition that does not prioritise the defence of quality journalism.”
Got it? Depressingly, that’s one of the clearer missives coming from Brussels. One thing about training any of the EU institutions is that you’re never short of material. They churn out a vast number of words, but most of them fall into the category of typing, rather than writing.
I’ve just finished a series of workshops for Eurocities, an organisation that represents major European cities. The delegates were a delight: bright, multi-lingual people who only need telling once and they’ve got it.
But they are battling against an unyielding monster called Brussels English. This bastardised language features everyday words like “modalities”. All those famed bullshit bingo terms must appear at least once in every sentence (which in itself has to be at least 50 words long and lack any punctuation).
Who is the fool (come to think of it, there’s probably a sea of them) that thinks this sort of nonsense has anything to do with communication? Is there some shadowy bureaucrat who leads a grey team, scribbling through anything that risks being immediately comprehensible, replacing simplicity with obscurity?
The problem is not with the foot soldiers, I suspect, but with the generals. Either they don’t know, don’t read or don’t care. But if Brussels want to tell the rest of the world what it’s achieving, it needs to do so in a language that human beings can understand.