The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way

by Bill Bryson

Having said all that, we have a well-practiced gift for obfuscation in the English-speaking world. According to U.S. News & World Report [February 18, 1985], an unnamed American airline referred in its annual report to an “involuntary conversion of a 727.” It meant that it had crashed. At least one hospital, according to the London Times, has taken to describing a death as “a negative patient-care outcome.” The Pentagon is peerless at this sort of thing. It once described toothpicks as “wooden interdental stimulators” and tents as “frame-supported tension structures.” Here is an extract from the Pentagon’s Department of Food Procurement specifications for a regulation Type 2 sandwich cookie: “The cookie shall consist of two round cakes with a layer of filling between them. The weight of the cookie shall be not less than 21.5 grams and filling weight not less than 6.4 grams. The base cakes shall be uniformly baked with a color ranging from not lighter than chip 27885 or darker than chip 13711. . . . ​The color comparisons shall be made under north sky daylight with the objects held in such a way as to avoid specular refractance.” And so it runs on for fifteen densely typed pages. Every single item the Pentagon buys is similarly detailed: plastic whistles (sixteen pages), olives (seventeen pages), hot chocolate (twenty pages).