Bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo tops banned words list

Editor's Notes

Our city editor recently handed a list of about 100 banned words to the reporters at their weekly meeting.

First they groaned. Some muttered under their breath. A few argued.

How in the world were they supposed to write about a feasibility study without using the word feasibility? How could they cover a City Council meeting without facilities, mitigations, allocations, implementations and infrastructure? How could they ever quote another public official?

New rule: No sentence will stagger under the weight of bureaucratic mumbo-jumbo. Reporters will throw out all those tired, poor, wretched words, yearning to be rewritten.

Take vehicle, for instance. Why write about a vehicle found in the canal when you can be so much more specific by calling it a car or a pickup? Same goes for juveniles. That’s cop talk: Call them teens instead. And in case you find yourself writing the word utilize, don’t. Trade it for three letters — use.

Every reporter who takes a beat at a newspaper knows that it has its own language to be translated. Sources from school officials to cops, lawyers, politicians, coaches and bureaucrats use languages steeped in jargon, and if reporters aren’t careful, they’ll pick up the same shopworn vocabularies.

Thankfully, some public agencies are starting to recognize the problem. Contra Costa County supervisors, for instance, took a brilliant anti-acronym stand last month and banished alphabet soup like EIR (Environment Impact Report), ABAG (Association of Bay Area Governments) and RFP (Request for Proposals) from all speech and written materials. Only commonly used acronyms such as FBI or BART are acceptable.

Supervisor John Gioia of Richmond said he was inspired by the board of commissioners in Kitsap County, Wash., which fines anyone $1 who uses bureaucratic acronyms. The money goes to charity.

“I think it’s important for government officials to speak in English,” the Kitsap board’s chairwoman said.

In the same way, we think it’s important that people understand what government is up to, so our job at the newspaper is to make what we write more understandable. We need to avoid clichés (like the plague), and jargon (like best practices), which are ho-hum to readers.

So the list of banned words is an attempt to strive for language that’s fresh, never arcane. Strong, active verbs. Meaningful nouns. Rarely used adjectives and adverbs.

If you see any of the following words in our copy, feel free to point them out to us. (Note that this is just a partial list, because I don’t want your eyes to glaze over completely.)

Banned: Action plan, assess, at-risk, benchmarking, capacity, continuum, empowerment, extrapolate, incentivize, initiative, joint resources, leverage, paid personnel, residence, stakeholders, sustained injuries, juveniles.

If you have any nominations of your own, send them my way to add to the banned word list. And if you have any pristine, unsullied replacement words, ship them over, too.

We stand with reporter Judith Miller

Editor's Notes

Some people are having a tough time with the Judith Miller case. They lament that this confrontation between the press and government isn’t anything like the last big fight, the one in 1971 to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Regrettably, they’re right; this case involves what could turn out to be a political hack manipulating the media and putting a CIA agent in danger — which is a federal crime.

But who is in jail? The journalist who didn’t even write a story. And something’s terribly wrong with that picture.

To give you some background: A former CIA consultant criticized the Bush administration, and, presumably, one or more high-ranking government officials tried to discredit him by telling journalists that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA operative. A syndicated columnist and a Time magazine reporter wrote the story about the outing of the CIA agent, and a federal grand jury investigating the case demanded the identity of the sources.

Columnist Robert Novak must have coughed up the information, because he wasn’t held in contempt of court, as were Time’s Matthew Cooper and New York Times correspondent Judith Miller, the two other reporters who had received the leak. After a federal judge ordered them to testify, an appeals court affirmed the order, and the Supreme Court let it stand.

Time Inc. then handed over its reporter’s documents to a special prosecutor, and Cooper agreed to testify. Then on Wednesday, Miller, who had promised not to reveal her source, and kept her promise, went to jail.

Journalists are supposed to be watchdogs of government, trained to bare our teeth at anyone who would take away our legal rights and abilities to keep the public fully informed. Unfortunately, on the federal level, we don’t have complete protection, as Miller’s incarceration sadly shows.

Sure, we’ve had more than a few journalists who have abused their privileges and humiliated the rest of us. But we have to ask, as Miller did, “Do you want to hear from authorized government spokesmen, authorized corporate spokesmen alone, or do you want to hear what’s really going on inside an organization?”

In Tracy, we rarely write stories using confidential sources, and we’ve only twice had to fight to keep our reporters from turning into investigators for the government by being forced to give up their notebooks or provide witness statements. But it happens often in Washington, especially with administrations determined to operate in secrecy and federal prosecutors who find themselves threatened more by those who wield pens and notebooks than by what could happen to our democracy without them.

Judith Miller made a personal choice of conscience in defense of the First Amendment and its principles. She stood her ground, and for that, I stand in awe.