A Bit about Bureaucratic Tongues

Crafting phrases and sentences in bureaucratese is not one of my strengths. Oh, I can do it. I can write, say, “We seek a culture that advocates for excellence.” But I don’t have to feel good about it. To me, “Burt wiped the bread crumbs from his beard” is preferable as a sentence that actually says something in contrast to the ghostly, collective barb above. 

I would like to think that “advocating for excellence” says something, but think about what is actually being done and said. How do I advocate? Join another committee? Write an ad? Make my family uncomfortable? Put a bumper sticker on my car? Is that enough advocacy? Excellence is rare, of course, but people in educational circles speak and act as though it happens all the time. A few years back, a slogan on my daughter’s high school billboard read like this: “Excellence is expected.” I could see the fires of a concentration camp in that one. Excellence, that most rare of human achievements, is expected, and you will produce it? Or else? 

Indeed, on one academic committee on which I serve, I’ve heard “excellence” batted around so much that it has taken on the hue of a word like “awesome,” a word that once meant something like fear-inspiring but now means something closer to “being exciting in a dorm room sort of way.”

Even more surprising of late for me is hearing people I respect delight in the “crafting” of a vapidly-turned bureaucratic phrase. Again, as noted above, I serve on a committee for which we often have to craft documents and “statements.” The statements feel more like clouds, and the documents are meant to be all-encompassing and create wiggle-room. On finishing one of these phrases, the director of our committee praised us all for it. This is the kind of person who has probably spent too much time crafting mission statements for his church. As I was being praised, I felt uncomfortably like I was one of Sauron’s minions sending up smoke from Mordor.

Here’s the problem with all of this: It’s all around us now, and usually it’s accompanied by colorful visuals. As we simply accept more and more language that means nothing, I believe we stop expecting words, language, to actually signify. We become used to it. We accept it. There are serious moral consequences to this.