The buzz-phrase generator

‘I have pointed elsewhere to the baleful influence of American gobbledygook on certain sorts of writing, both academic and official. Defence is a subject which has suffered badly (owing, some say, to the Harvard influence imported by Mr McNamara into the United States Department of Defence.) But the phenomenon has not gone uncriticised even on the other side of the Atlantic. The Canadian Defence Department is credited with the invention of the following ‘buzz-phrase generator’:

The procedure is simple. You think of a 3-digit number at random and take the corresponding word from each column. Thus, 601 gives you the buzz-phrase ‘optimal management flexibility’, 095 gives ‘integrated policy concept’, 352 gives ‘parallel logistical capability’, and so on. The authors claim that the buzz-phrase generator gives its users ‘instant expertise on matters pertaining to defence’, enabling them to invest anything they write, not with any particular meaning, but with ‘that proper ring of decisive, progressive, knowledgeable authority’.

I have seen a British development of this invention which has three columns of no fewer than sixty lines each and includes not only most of the vogue words mentioned elsewhere in this book but many others too. This may be over elaborate for practical use, but its compilation speaks well for British civil servants. It is wonderful how slight the difference is between some of the serious writing produced nowadays on defence matters and some of the parodies produced with the aid of the Canadian or British buzz-phrase generator.’

From: ‘The Complete Plain Words’, by Sir Ernest Gowers, Pelican Books 1982, pp 308-309 (First published as ‘The Complete Plain Words’ HM Stationary Office, 1954)