The New Gobbledygook:
A New Zealand Dictionary and Guidebook
by Peter Isaac
Reviewers say:-
“The blurb says that this a scary book. The only people it should scare are public servants – if we ever wake up to what they are doing. According to author Peter Isaac they are the purveyors of the New Gobbledygook - a way of manipulating the English language that he entertainingly and scathingly lays bare.
His collection of offending terms includes ‘analyst’ – essentially a middle-level government clerical employee; ‘consultant’ – ‘someone you can fire’; ‘political correctness’ – extreme politeness; and ‘governance’ – a posh word for running anything of any size.
The New Gobbledygook also infiltrates company mission statements, ministerial speeches, and job ads. ‘Having strategic input to long term directives’ sounds very grand but probably just means that you will do a bit more than clerical chores; you will be involved in meetings.
If Joe Bloggs doesn’t understand the New Gobbledygook, does it matter? It does if he wants the job – he’ll only get it if he speaks the language. And if he puts a plainly worded question he may get twaddle back.
If The Treasury or the Public Service get away with hijacking the language to their own ends, and we let them get away with it, we can look forward to the Newspeak of Orwell’s 1984.”
-Margaret Austin, The Wellingtonian
“This guidebook will be useful for most of you who actually get jobs after university as the majority will inevitably end up in soulless bureaucratic ‘careers’ where people actually communicate like the examples in this book demonstrate and you will be forced to do so too. So get used to it. … The painful overuse of flowery PC technical language is made obvious and it really does make you want to stay well clear of it – but I bet you won’t.”
-Anna Tuson, Salient
“One must be amused by it, otherwise I would weep at what has happened to plain English.”
-Helen Bissland, Southland Times
“A copy of The New Gobbledygook should be placed on the desk of every politician and bureaucrat with strict instructions to read it, use simple English or risk having your gold-plated super schemes terminated!”
-Jim McLees, Wanganui Chronicle
"If you are puzzled by some of bamboozling language used in government or management consultants' reports, or certain types of advertising, Peter Isaac's The New Gobbledygook: A New Zealand dictionary and guidebook is for you. President of the National Press Club, Isaac is only partly facetious in his explanations of terms such as "internal client group" (colleagues), "consultation document" (meaning let's delay this), "grief-carer" (undertaker), "gifting" (donating) or "arts" (officially considered a patronising, mildly contemptuous term now replaced by "creative" as in Creative New Zealand)."
-Otago Daily Times
"I opened this book to a random page and the first phrase that jumped out at me was “psychographic segmentation.” It is explained that this means Market Research - but you could have fooled me! ....
For any professional writer, particularly those who deal with the language of government and related areas, this book should be on your bookshelf. I think I’ll take this to work, where I have to deal with TEC, NZQA and their ‘language’.
Peter Isaac, President of the National Press Club, has created a very useful tool, a book on language usage in NZ that is directly relevant to anyone who writes professionally."
-Alyson B. Cresswell, Freelance
"It was when I was still a juvenile future constitutional figurehead substitute that I first became sensitised by my mother tongue-abuse awareness. How many of us, I wonder, when faced with pretentious gobbledygook and empty jargon, experience a kick-start into despair mode? My feelings towards you are, attitudinally, those of enormous encouragement."
- Prince Charles (presented with a copy on his March 2005 visit to NZ)
