GOLDEN BULL AWARD WINNERS
The winners of 2013’s Golden Bull awards for the worst examples of gobbledygook — as ‘presented’ by the Plain English Campaign:
An open seminar at the University of Essex Centre for Psychoanalytic Studies entitled: Between the Unspeakable and the Speculum: Poetry and Psychoanalysis
This paper will be a reflection on what endures and on the archaeology of utterance — an archaeology that is intimately connected to castration. As a Symbolic artefact poetry stands between the darkness of the unknowable— Freud’s navel — and Lacan’s mirror of semblance in which false architectures of the self, emerge as a parody of the truth.
Response from the tax office after an attempt to email them a file:
The submission of this document has failed due to departmental specific business logic in the Body tag. Your submission contains an unrecognized namespace.
From a letter sent by Alliance Trust Savings:
How will I be impacted? We have confirmed with the Fund Managers that the rebate paying share classes you are invested in, listed overleaf, have an equivalent within the ‘clean share’ class. The new share class has a lower or equal net AMC to the fund that you are currently invested in and so you will either pay the same, or less, than you did previously when taking any previous rebates into account.
From a letter from the Department of Energy and Climate Change:
The second part consists of an Occupancy Assessment (OA) that adjusts the standardized EPC estimates based on information about the occupants… GDARS build upon the information in the EPC by incorporating additional information gathered from the OA about how the occupants in the property actually use energy… I hope this is helpful.
‘Bar manager/manageress’ job advertisement:
Job Purpose
Provides beverages by procuring beverage ingredients.
Duties
Accomplishes bar human resource objectives by recruiting, selecting, orienting, training, assigning, scheduling, coaching, counselling, and disciplining employees. Achieves bar operational objectives by contributing information and analysis to functional strategic plans and reviews. Plans beer, wine, and spirits drink menus by researching mixology techniques.
Chief investment officer about the sale of a business park:
The sale is very much in line with our ongoing focus on recycling capital out of assets at the appropriate time in the cycle in order to crystallize gains from higher value uses and redeploy into other profitable growth opportunities in our core markets.
SUPERCALIFRAGILISTICEXPIALIDOCIOUS
When the film Mary Poppins came out in 1964, the song ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ was an instant hit with everyone except a couple of songwriters who’d written a song called ‘Supercalafajaistickespeealadojus’ fifteen years earlier and had actually shown it to Disney (the film’s producers). They — not unreasonably — brought a legal case against the composers of ‘Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious’ for several million dollars. However, they lost because, after listening to several witnesses, the judge decided that the word — or words like it — had been in use for years before either song had been written.
No one had any idea what the word meant — if anything — with the composers ofthe Mary Poppins song claiming that it was just ‘a very long word that had been passed down in many variations through many generations of kids. The word was first coined in 1918, and was supposed to be even bigger and harder to say than antidisestablishmentarianism.
“Without knowing the force of words, it is impossible to know more.”
—Confucius
“The beginning of wisdom is the definition of terms.”
—Socrates
“Words, so innocent and powerless as they are, as standing in a dictionary, how potent for good and evil they become in the hands of one who knows how to combine them.”
—Nathaniel Hawthorne
WHERE’S IT FROM?
DOGSBODY
This has its roots in the British Navy of the nineteenth century. One of the ghastly foods that British sailors were given to eat was pease pudding (a sort of dried pea concoction). The sailors, however, called it dog’s body — possibly because of the shape of the bag that the peas came in. Over time, the sort of sailor who had to eat this food and the food’s nickname became one. Eventually, the word dogsbody became used to describe any underling who always gets the worst jobs.