Crusader for Syntactic Disambiguation Exprobrates Banks' Labored Locutions

[question everything]

OCTOBER 6, 2009

Crusader for Syntactic Disambiguation Exprobrates Banks' Labored Locutions
Chrissie Maher Battles Murk in U.K. Lending; New Chapter in Lifelong Drive for Plain English

By SARA SCHAEFER MUñOZ
WSJ

NEW MILLS, England -- A few months ago, 71-year-old Chrissie Maher got a mailing from her bank titled "Personal and Private Banking -- Keeping You Informed." Baffled by its blizzard of terms such as "account facility limit," Ms. Maher replied in simpler language. "The leaflet needs much more thought if it is to be understood by your customers," she said in a letter to Royal Bank of Scotland Group PLC. "As it stands, it should be renamed 'Keeping You Confused.' " After critiquing the pamphlet's "tortuous and ambiguous sentences," she redrafted it, changing terms like "maximum debit balance" to "the most that can be owed."

RBS may have picked the wrong woman to target with financial mumbo jumbo. Ms. Maher is the founder of the Plain English Campaign, a 30-year-old group whose stated goal is to stem "the ever-growing tide of confusing and pompous language" that "takes away our democratic rights." Over the years, Ms. Maher and her group have battled police agencies, expansion planners at Heathrow Airport, and the "frequently bizarre language" of the European Union. (At issue: phrases such as "unlock clusters," "subsidiarity" and "sector-specific benchmarking.") She has blasted local government on the use of "worklessness" to refer to unemployment and once attacked the president of the U.K. Spelling Society over his claim that the apostrophe is "a waste of time." Now a grandmother of 11 who works out of a small farm in the hills outside Manchester, Ms. Maher is focusing on the current scourge of financial jargon.


"Families are losing their homes because of jargon-filled credit agreements," says Ms. Maher, an energetic presence in a crocheted sweater and eyeglasses. "Language has been misused and has contributed to the economic disaster."..

(snip)

While the clear-language campaign has worked over the years with banks and insurance companies, it was the financial crisis that sent Ms. Maher into the deep weeds of complex financial terms. Her team has sought to crack the meaning of tough nuts like collateralized debt obligations, or CDOs, seeking to break their code by isolating their elements: "We are not pretending that a Plain English definition of CDOs would have saved us from recession," Ms. Maher's Web site says. "This is the plain English attempt at defining what is at the heart of CDOs: Collateralized debt obligations are commitments to repay debts that are secured on assets." She has also put together a glossary of financial buzzwords including "asset sweat" (making assets work harder and more efficiently). She was initially mystified by the U.K. government's term "quantitative easing" -- the central bank's effort to put more money into the economy. "It sounded like something heavy was moving, but what and where?" she says.

(snip)


Ms. Maher grew up poor and often hungry in Liverpool and didn't learn to read until she attended night school at the age of 15. But she says her background motivated her to help ordinary people intimidated by high-level language. "I know what it's like to feel isolated because of words," she says. She began campaigning for clear language in the early 1970s, when she saw that impoverished people in Liverpool were having trouble deciphering benefit forms. She formally started the campaign in 1979, and achieved a success in the 1980s when the government agreed to rewrite thousands of forms.

The group became known for its "Golden Bull" awards for the worst examples of official jargon. Past winners have included a definition from the U.K.'s financial-services watchdog that read, "An unsolicited real time qualifying credit promotion is a real time qualifying credit promotion which is not a solicited real time qualifying credit promotion." Another winner: a sign at Gatwick Airport saying "Passenger shoe repatriation area only." This year, a front-runner is a 102-word sentence issued by a police chiefs association containing phrases such as "authentic answerability" and "amorphous challenges." "Amorphous challenges -- is that wrestling with a jellyfish, maybe?" the Web site asks.

(snip)

Ms. Maher also fields questions in the small town of New Mills. About a week ago, a 16-year-old rode his bicycle up to her farmhouse because he wanted to open a checking account but was thrown by terms in the bank's pamphlet such as AER -- or annual equivalent rate, which is an interest rate with annual compound interest. At a recent gathering for tea and cookies before church, Ms. Maher said, a woman came up to her waving a letter "with minuscule print" about her mortgage and asked for help understanding it. Ms. Maher said it had so many footnotes, asterisks and crosses, "it looked like a game of snakes and ladders and you needed a magnifying glass." Some, she says, have given up on banks entirely: "One older lady I know, she took her money and put it in a plastic bag and buried it in the garden."


http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125476135344665075.html (subscription)

Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page A1

[imdjh]

1. Say what you mean, and speak the truth.

Many years ago, I worked for an uneducated man who had done very well for himself, albeit in criminal enterprises most of the time. But once he had earned enough to open a legal and respectable business, he hired a legal and respectable person to be the face of that business: me. However, behind the scenes he was still from the streets and had little patience with my way of doing things. His frequent complaint was that I was not direct in my speaking. Like Aunt Alexandra, I lived in the subjunctive mood. I now have no patience with people who breath deeply, look off knowingly, or otherwise act as if they are trying to call the Bishop an asshole under their breath in church. I don't find indirect speech to be witty or respectable. Like my old boss, I now interrupt and order the speaker. "Just say what you mean".

Say what you mean, and speak the truth. Do these two things and you will never have to remember what you have said.

[question everything]

3. Business jargon is the worst

especially when trying to verbalize words like incentivize.

[MineralMan]

2. Very nice use of an obscure word.

I'm betting that not one in 1000 knows the meaning of exprobrate. Could be one in a lot more.

Good headline writing!

[question everything]

4. I certainly don't

and have yet to look it up. Perhaps you can explain? Even the other word - I had to "break" it to recognize the ambiguity part of it.

[MineralMan]

5. It just means "to scold."

It's archaic, and not used by anyone any more, but it was perfect for that headline for a story about complex language. Disambiguation, on the other hand, is used all the time, especially by wikipedia, which has disambiguation pages for many common terms, to help people get to the page they're looking for.

A good synonym for "exprobrate" is "berate," which is based on the same root, but is in current use.