Windyfoggery (From Theodore Bernstein (1965), The Careful Writer)

In nature wind and fog do not normally coexist. In language, however, they sometimes do, and the greater the wind the more impenetrable the fog. This linguistic condition may be thought of as windyfoggery. It embraces gobbledygook, that wordy, involved, and often unintelligible language usually associated with bureaucracy and big business. But it also includes the self-important circumlocution of ordinary orators, the pretentious pseudoscientific jargon of the pseudosciences, and the monumental unintelligibility of some criticism of those arts that do not readily accept the bridle of plain words.

There have been many translations into windyfoggery of well known pieces of simple writing – passages from the Bible, from Lincoln, from Shakespeare – and there have been many parodies in windyfoggery of ordinary thoughts. One illustration will bring out the point. Prof. Lionel Trilling of Columbia takes the statement “They fell in love and married” and translates it thus: “Their libidinal impulses being reciprocal, they activated their individual erotic drives and integrated them within the same frame of reference.” A contrived example, to be sure; but is it much different from writing, “improved financial support and less onerous work loads,” when one wishes to say, “more pay and less work”? Or is it much different from writing, “The supervision of driver and safety education at the state and local levels should be assigned to personnel qualified by virtue of their adequate personal characteristics and specialized training and experience in this field,” when all that is being said is that good teachers are needed?

Turn now, if you will, to art criticism. This is the kind of thing you sometimes find: “Motherwell seems to have several kinds of courage; one of them is the courage to monumentalize the polymorphous-perverse world of his inner quickenings; he is the architect of a lyrical anxiety where Gorky was its master scrivener; the liquefied tick of Gorky’s id-clock becomes in Motherwell the resonant Versaillean tock, the tall duration of a muralizing necessity that strains to leap its pendulum’s arc while carrying a full weight of iconographic potency.”

Pseudoscientific writing occasionally includes this sort of observation: “A factor analysis of the scale scores has yielded six attitude clusters that make sense intuitively and that resemble factors found in other job satisfaction studies.” Or this type of definition (this one is a definition of reading presented by a professor of educational psychology): “A processing skill of symbolic reasoning, sustained by the interfacilitation of an intricate hierarchy of substrata factors that have been mobilized as a psychological working system and pressed into service in accordance with the purpose of the reader.” Let us mobilize our substrata factors and proceed.

Dr. William B. Bean, who in the Archives of Internal Medicine often tilted a lancet at the writing operations of his fellow healers, has passed on the story of a New York plumber who had cleaned out some drains with hydrochloric acid and then wrote to a chemical research bureau, inquiring, “Was there any possibility of harm?” As told by Dr. Bean, the story continues:

“The first answer was, ‘The efficacy of hydrochloric acid is indisputably established but the corrosive residue is incompatible with metallic permanence.’ The plumber was proud to get this and thanked the people for approving of his method. The dismayed research bureau rushed another letter to him saying, ‘We cannot assume responsibility for the production of a toxic and noxious residue with hydrochloric acid. We beg leave to suggest to you the employment of an alternative procedure.’ The plumber was more delighted than ever and wrote to thank them for reiterating their approval. By this time the bureau got worried about what might be happening to New York’s sewers and called in a third man, an older scientist, who wrote simply, ‘Don’t use hydrochloric acid. It eats hell out of pipes.”

Windyfoggery may result from sheer pomposity. It may result from a kind of wistful desire to make learned sounds. It may result from an incapacity for direct, clear thinking. Or it may result from incomplete knowledge of one’s subject, which leads one to wrap a paucity of information in a plethora of words. Jargon may be useful for communication between members of the same profession. But windyfoggery, which often is jargon gone wrong and blanketed in blurriness, is not useful to any purpose.