‘Lengthy Memoranda and Gobbledygook Language’
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2024/03/18/gobbledygook
‘Lengthy Memoranda and Gobbledygook Language’

Link to: https://archive.org/details/Maverick1944MemoAboutGobbledygook

Daring Fireball
@daringfireball excellent article! I try and adhere to the BLUF principle as defined in The Tongue and Quill, I find it excellent in keeping me on track with emails and ensuring the recipient is getting the value upfront

@daringfireball

I read the memo and this came to mind.

https://wankernomics.com/

I showed it to my wife who works for the government. She agreed nothing has changed in the last 80 years.

Wankernomics

Wankernomics
@daringfireball As a non-native english speaker, I find the Smaller War Plants Corporation hard to parse. What would they produce? Weaponized shrubs? Factories churning out skirmishes?
@rickardlind Would be easier to understand if it had been pants, not plants.
@gruber @rickardlind
If it were pants, who’s the small war pants customer? Ewoks? Lilliputians? Hobbits?
@daringfireball “gobbledygook, a fabulous word with no true synonym”
🤔
@NoodlesNinja None of those words means exactly what gobbledygook means. Gobbledygook is a type of jargon, but most jargon is not gobbledygook.
@gruber that’s true for so many words: none of their synonyms mean exactly what the reference word means.
And really, you would be able to swap most occurrences of gobbledygook to a chosen word from that list (which extends further by the way) without anyone raising an eyebrow at the resulting sentence.
@daringfireball Would this include not using obscure words when a commonly known synonym exists?
@daringfireball The irony is they wanted people to use Plain English but they invented a new word in the process 🤷🏼‍♂️