The Great Debate
At the November meeting — Kate Tilley reports

‘Should editors be required to learn bureaucratese as a second language?' That was the quirky question members puzzled over in a hotly contested debate at the November meeting.

Jennifer Wright launched the affirmative case with an anecdote and a song. She said ‘entering a new phase of my career' was the euphemism a colleague had used for being made redundant and spoke of the threats confronting today's editors.

Her tuneful song entreated editors to embrace bureaucratese before our jobs were restructured away. ‘Learn to speak their language, challenge what is said, communicate with bureaucrats, support and promote IPEd.' Jennifer said that, without learning bureaucratese, editors were in danger of allowing the profession to decay.

Judy Heinemann was the first speaker for the negative. She argued that bureaucratese was not a separate language, but a misuse of our existing language. ‘A real language has a basis in culture. It's a way to express ideas, feelings and truths. Bureaucratese doesn't have that capacity at any level.'

Judy said any suggestion editors should learn ‘this gobbledygook' was nonsensical and insulting. Editors were intermediaries between writers and readers. ‘We work with words, we interpret, clarify and restructure text. We don't need to learn bureaucratese, we know it,' she said. Editors should deal with bureaucratese in the same way they dealt with any other abuse of the language. It was a corruption of the language and editors were well equipped to edit it.

‘Bureaucratese doesn't convey meaning, it is often used to hide it,' Judy said. Editors should aim to stamp out bureaucratese, not support it by learning it.

Paul Bennett, second speaker for the affirmative, said bureaucratese was a dialect and editors should be bilingual. ‘Editors must speak to writers in a language they don't understand,' he said. Editors needed to know bureaucratese, or any other ‘-eses', like educationese or sportspersonese. Without specialist knowledge they could take too long on jobs, charge too much, and lose work. Paul suggested much of the bureaucratese in our workplaces was generated by people with MBAs, or ‘masters of barbaric abstractitis', but stressed it was essential to understand the language MBAs used. ‘You have to know this stuff ... to rewrite it into something more sensible.'

David Paterson, second speaker for the negative, used a medical analogy, saying bureaucratese was a sickness. It had proliferated because of computers, but had now crept into our fridges (on the back of milk cartons), was taking on religion (his example was a twisted attempt to justify celibacy for priests) and would follow us to the grave (his example, the Terrorist Death Penalty Enhancement Act).

‘Editors are language doctors, we check for disease. Our fingers are like stethoscopes, feeling for a pulse. We advise people how to keep their words in shape, and we do it all with our first language,' David said. ‘Editors don't need to learn bureaucratese as a second language; writers and speakers of bureaucratese need to learn English as a first language.'

Helena Bond, final speaker for the affirmative, said bureaucratese corrupted and corroded the building blocks of English. ‘But we cannot afford not to speak the language of power, the language of our employers, of insurers, of contracts.'

To edit copy, you must understand it, she argued. That way, editors could help writers ‘throw off their chains', and communicate with their readers. ‘It is our core business to understand the secrets of the bureaucratese dialect and we have to learn it because knowledge is power and ... we need to protect ourselves', she said.

‘Bureaucratese is not sick, it's flourishing. But it doesn't sicken us. To fight it we must understand it.'

Tim Bugler, final speaker for the negative, said bureaucratese was not a language, and to regard it as such gave it an undeserved legitimacy. Members' laughter at the examples of bureaucratese that peppered the debate demonstrated that editors were very familiar with it, he said. ‘We already have the skills to understand it; we don't need to learn it.'

The debate was expertly moderated by Robyn Heales. At the end, when members were asked to select the winning team by acclamation, it was difficult to tell the votes apart. So Robyn diplomatically declared that each team had won ‘in its own way'.