Good time to celebrate verbal gaffes

Tomorrow happens to be Plain English Day which has in recent years morphed into International Plain Language Day designed to promote the proper use of language.

- Roger Crutchley

In other words the aim is to cut out all the gibberish, mumbo jumbo, codswallop, balderdash, tripe, tommyrot, twaddle, tosh and bosh you may have become accustomed to... heaven forbid, some of it even in PostScript.

In the past the Plain English campaign has handed out annual Foot in Mouth Awards given to the biggest culprits, usually politicians who have a certain knack of wrecking the English language. Interestingly no awards have been given in the past couple of years possibly because there have been too many candidates to choose from.

It probably won't come as a great surprise that a three-time “winner” is former British prime minister Boris Johnson. In 2004 he came up with the following baffling response on a TV panel show: “I cannot fail to disagree with you less.”

Mr Boris won it again in 2016 when he claimed Brexit would be a "titanic success” — a rather unfortunate choice of words when you consider what happened to the ship.

However it is unlikely anyone will beat the offering of former US secretary of defence Donald Rumsfeld who in 2003 uttered the following splendid observation:

“As we know, there are known knowns, there are things we know we know. There are also known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”

It’s hard to follow that but we must not overlook George W Bush who received a well-earned Life Time Achievement Award for “services to gobbledygook”.