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By JAMES J. KILPATRICK
UnfrcnalPna
A letter is at hand from a gentlelnan in Seattle. He encloses a document (I do not know how otherwise to describe it) given to him by a friend. It purports to be an outline of a program of employee training. He solemnly swears he did not make it up.
The document begins by explaining that the program’s “process architecture is decomposed into three tiers.” The tiers are “macro processes, sub processes, and working level processes.” The document goes mi to explain that “Sponsors will be assigned at the macro process level only but will represent all decomposed processes within the macro process.” - My correspondent said that neither he nor Ms friend had the foggiest notion of what the document meant to say. They believed it was written in the English language, though they confessed uncertainty. Could I provide a translation?
No. The document was not written in English. It was written in Gook, wMch is short for Gobbledegook, an alien tongue first identified, I believe, by Rep. Maury Maverick of Texas about 1944. The language purports to be English, hut in fact it is something else entirely—not a dialect, not a form of ethnic or regional speech, but a kind of speech that is divorced from meaning. > In this regard, the document folly meets the requirements laid down by the philosopher Calvin. This is not the theolgian John Calvin (1509-1564). It is the Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, the precocious cMld who discerned some months ago that “the first purpose of language is to obscure meaning.” This was clearly the purpose of those who wrote of the decomposed processes within the macro process of process architecture. Yes. I,
Gook is widely spoken, though it is seldom understood. A letter has dortie to hand from the executive director of the Freedom Forum Media Studies Center at Columbia Universtity in New York. It begins:
“A spirit of connectedness linkihg continuing work with pertinent
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