As a community journalist, besides English, you must be fluent in several languages. I speak cop, politician and school administrator.
They don't teach that in journalism school. You have to sort through these difficult dialects on your own. I have been doing this for a long time, so no press release can intimidate me anymore.
I think school administrator may be the most difficult language to grasp. You would think it would be politician, but no. Their stuff is just overwrought, self-aggrandizing bloviation that can be easily dissected to discover the essence of what the hell they are actually talking about. That is a service we journalists provide to the public. I've been at political rallies when afterward people have come up to me and asked, "Do you know what he just said?"
Me: "Yeah. He wants your money."
But "education speak" is jam-packed full of incomprehensible jargon and strange acronyms that, even if you knew what they stood for, still would not make any sense. Educators just love to abbreviate stuff. Some of my favorites over the years include:
PBIS (Positive Behavioral Intervention and Support), which I once actually heard a school superintendent pronounce out loud with a straight face as "pee-bis." I was the only one in the room who guffawed out loud.
ASS (All Students Succeed, and more recently, Alternative Suspension System). This myopic acronym has ruined more official school documents and ID badges than you can shake a laser pointer at.
DoLT (Department of Learning & Teaching). Do I really need to say anything? It's low-hanging fruit.
SOL (Standards of Learning), which refers to standardized testing metrics, but can leave many teachers feeling, um, out of luck.
My first job as a newspaper editor back in the 1980s (not in this town), I had to deal with a local school superintendent who was as greasy and corrupt as they come. He loved sports and wanted our varsity football team to reign supreme. Unfortunately, they were kind of mediocre. So, he recruited a kid from a southern Westchester school who had been kicked off his team for academic reasons to move to our school district. An apartment was rented for him and his single mom. The source of the funds to do this highly unethical and somewhat illegal maneuver was questioned.
The "student" was a nice kid, but about as academically gifted as a box of Styrofoam packing pellets. So, he was provided with a curriculum that a hazelnut could pass, and administrators were willing to look the other way as long as those 40-yard runs from the line of scrimmage kept coming. Through all these sketchy shenanigans, the school board at the time was completely infatuated with this superintendent, and he could do no wrong in their eyes.
He used to call me up when he was unhappy with a story we published.
He would say, "Do you really think that story was appropriate?"
Appropriate?
I would ask him if we got any facts wrong because I was more than willing to print a correction or clarification.
"No. I just don't think it was appropriate," he would say.
I learned quickly that "appropriate" was education speak for, "Please don't write stuff that makes me or the school district look bad."
To this day I remain as inappropriate as allowed by society.
It doesn't matter anyway. I have a sister who has spent decades in the education industry as a guidance counselor, and she has helped me translate lots of Byzantine stuff over the years.
Cop speak can seem intimidating at first, but with time and experience, you too can navigate these twisty word paths that are fraught with convoluted jargon and overly formal descriptions.
First of all, cops will never say "man" or "woman." It's always male or female suspect. They never say, "the driver of the car." Instead, you will get "the operator of the vehicle."
They will never say, "The cop shot the suspect." However, you might get something like, "The officer was compelled to discharge his duty weapon following an escalated encounter."
Discharge his duty weapon? That sounds more like he has lower gastrointestinal issues.
And law enforcement never says, "The man ran away from the cops." Nope. Instead, you'll get this: "The male suspect fled on foot in an apparent attempt to avoid apprehension."
Sometimes dealing with all this nutty jargon makes me want to ascend to the pinnacle of an altitudinous structure and voluntarily succumb to gravity.
Getting back to political speak—unlike cop and education speak, we all are confronted with this language every day. Whether it is on our TVs, our computers or our phones, we are bombarded 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Like Sumerian, it should be a dead language, but it just won’t die.
Politicians almost never answer the question that was actually asked. Ask them whether it's raining outside, and you'll get a three-minute dissertation on climate change and carbon footprints. By the end you're still not sure whether you need an umbrella.
Every administration has its own dialect. Some promise to "move the conversation forward." Every politician, regardless of party, has mastered the art of spewing 300 words while revealing approximately the same amount of information as a Magic 8 Ball.
One of my favorites is the phrase, "I reject the premise of the question." That's political speak for, "I know exactly where you're going with this, and I'm taking the next exit."
Another is, "We're laser-focused." That's comforting until you realize politicians have been laser-focused on the same problems for about 40 years. Whatever batteries those lasers use, they're apparently sold separately.
Then there are the classics: "At the end of the day..." "Moving forward..." "To be perfectly clear..." (Ha! The irony!), and "The American people..." As Shakespeare said, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
So yes, after all these years I've become multilingual. I can translate school administrator, police officer, firefighter and politician into plain English. It's a valuable skill. I just wish someone would invent an app that translates campaign speeches into one simple sentence. It would save us all a lot of time.
And I would appreciate it bigly.
Bob Dumas is editor-at-large for Halston Media. He is working on a new book called "What the Hell Did He Just Say?" coming to bookstores soon. Send inquiries to dumas@halstonmedia.com.
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