Rudd and the art of talking in circles

Henry Lawson and Henry Handel Richardson would shudder at the balderdash from contemporary commerce. Alfred Deakin and Edmund Barton would barely recognise the bureaucratese. Why surrender to this argot of management consultants and PR spinners? A plague upon them!

Examples of clear speech abound in our history. One hundred years ago, Nobel-prize winning scientist, Sir William Bragg, spoke at Adelaide University on the usually penumbral subject of physics. “For ages,” said Bragg, “men have asked themselves "What is light?" When the ancient writer recorded as one of the great acts of creation the command of God, "Let there be light!", he testified truly of its importance to mankind, and bore witness to the extent to which the seers of his day had grasped that importance.”

Fiat lux. That's more like it. If he were writing today, Bragg might be tempted to use vogue phrases such as 'illumination event' or 'luminosity occurrence'. In a less pretentious Australia, even esoteric writers didn't call a spade a 'manually-operated excavation implement'. There were giants in those days. We have colossi now but all too many lose their way via peregrinations of prose. Let there be light.