Is this sustainable?

Regular readers may well be aware that I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the use/misuse of language by the EU institutions. How people use what appears to be English words and grammatical structures but fail to convey meaning. It appears that I am not alone.

This written declaration has just appeared, penned by one of the Ind/Dem MEPs, Vladimir Zelezny, great mucker of Vaclav Klaus.

Written Declaration on overuse of the adjective ‘sustainable’

The European Parliament,
– having regard to the concept of ‘sustainable development’, which originated in the United Nations World Commission on Environment and Development,
– having regard to the European Commission document entitled ‘Towards a global
partnership for sustainable development’ (COM(2002)0082 final),
– having regard to Rule 116 of its Rules of Procedure,
A. whereas the current parliamentary term has seen the overuse of the adjective ‘sustainable’ and its combination with various other words to create expressions that frequently make no sense in the context,
B. whereas the word ‘sustainable’ is repeated in almost all policies and strategies, producing empty, meaningless phrases that may give rise to dispute,
C. whereas, with the emergence of such expressions, they are being transformed into incantations and cryptography, disguising the real meaning of the concepts we discuss,
D. whereas the overuse of the adjective ‘sustainable’ is itself not sustainable,
1. Calls on European institutions and agencies to use this term in a sensible and balanced way;
2. Calls on all institutions to use the term semantically correctly;
3. Proposes a temporary moratorium on the word ‘sustainable’;
4. Instructs its President to forward this declaration, together with the names of the signatories, to the Commission, the Council and the parliaments of the Member States.

Thank you Vladimir.

No human damage! and other linguistic shenanigans

A week after the event, and a couple of days after the story started to come out - (what took them so long I wonder?) the Parliament services have finally put out a statement about the collapse of the Strasbourg hemicycle chamber ceiling. It includes the following glorious phrase.

"Fortunately, the incident caused no human damage."

Like so much of what comes through our in-boxes and in-trays this appears to be written in English, but lacks a certain something.

Similarly, last night I was talking to a fonctionaire last night in the pub. He is a newbie, only been here for a couple of months and he was trying to recover from what must be thought of as a trying day.

He had spent the morning, all four hours of it, trying to persuade his Head of Unit to define the difference between,

1 - An initiative,
2 - A policy
3 - A program
4 - A project
5 - A contract

He is to write a submission of approx 75 pages on a spend of upwards of four billion Euro. All he wanted to do was to define terms before he started. After the four hours the impression he got was that most of the terms were for practicle purposes interchangeable with the meaning of one sliding into the meaning of the next on a scale that stretches from point 1 through to point 5.

Better still he was told that his work should concentrate on the executive summary, which would the only part of his efforts that would be signed off up the command chain. All the analysis and meat would be left to him.

So what we have here is that about 5-10% of the effort, that is the PR aspect, will be checked and signed off, but the 90% actual policy will be left to him, an admittedly highly qualified, but institutionally inexperienced junior functionary. It will not have to be peer reviewed and will be responsible for the way in which 4 billion, yes 4 billion Euros will be spent.

I understand the afternoon was spent trying to define the term used to describe a tender bid. No, no conclusion was reached there either. The fellow surely deserved his beer.

He finished by bemoaning that he would not even be able to produce what he called,
"An architechtural blueprint for following the process procedure (or something very like that)". This is for Data-wharehousing...

See what I mean about a language that at first glance is English but has no real link to the language as she is spoken and understood.