“There are individuals who are deceased.”

So said an official of a Florida municipality after Hurricane Michael blasted his city into the next county.

“Individuals”? These were Moms and Dads and kids. “Deceased”? Sorry, sir, they actually died and left heartbroken families. Others were merely gravely injured, and many had their homes and worldly goods turned into uninsured rubble. This was rather personal. These were humans, not statistics.

“Individuals who are deceased” has all the compassion of a toe-tag. People are looking for a bit of hope and concern. At a time like this, the last thing they need is to feel like a blip in an occurrence report.

There is a time for officialese, but only rarely– I’ll get to that later. When you’re dealing with real people who are struggling in real time, officialese is like cold porridge.

We lawyers and those who live in our world are particularly guilty of using officialese, in our case known as legalese. After all, why use one word when three will do? (Now, to be sure, in the right setting, it is important to use precise legal terminology, which like any other technical code, has a precision and richness of meaning which is impossible to replicate with “plain English”. But that’s actually a different thing and for another Friday Briefing.)

By way of example, here’s a “legal world” out-of-office response from a coffee-fetcher for an assistant to a deputy-gofer: “Please be advised that I shall be physically absent from the office for the entire temporal period February 7th through 16th inclusive, pursuant to the firm’s annual leave policy.”

Please be advised? Physically absent?– Sir, madame, take your soul on holiday, too– it could use a bit of sunshine and breeze.

Without doubt there are times you need to keep your force-fields up, but most of the time you are communicating with fellow human beings who walk the same vale of joy and tears that you walk. Whacking them over the head with a frozen club not only brings them no joy, but is likely to produce pushback as they “govern themselves accordingly”.

Why do we feel this need to be so cold and stiff? There are two reasons, I think. First, most people who regularly hide behind officialese are like dogs who are “fear biters”, that is, they’re not bad dogs or vicious, they’re just doing what they think they have to do to protect themselves against a perceived risk. Nothing personal, just frightened.

Second, some awkward writers are trying to sound important. They throw around stuff like “Please govern yourself accordingly”, which, although it has a valid place in legal strategy, generally is nothing more than a gratuitous verbal kick to the crotch, with the predictable payback.

Driving tacks with a sledgehammer is just not smart, and amateur litigators need to be careful with an unfamiliar arsenal.
Using simple English (or French, or Spanish, or Afrikaans) and a sprinkling of sunshine costs no extra, but is far more likely to get a quicker and better response– not to mention making someone else’s day a little brighter. More often than not all it takes is a bit of confidence and imagination on the part of the writer.

Now, as I promised to discuss, there is a place for officialese. It’s chiefly when you need a smokescreen, for good or for ill. When you’ve got something to hide or disguise, lay on the officialese in great gobs– the obfuscation and de-perceptualization of an otherwise obvious state of affairs should primarily be calculated to de-maximize and/or camouflage said perception, secondarily to precipitate exhaustion, fatigue and/or resignation on the part of an otherwise resistant reader, and at a tertiary but no less crucial level, to blah, blah, blah…..

This a first cousin to “fine print”– language so opaque, bulky and dense as to discourage comprehension. And we all know why that’s used.

So, try this for the upcoming week: before you start to compose an e-mail or letter, even before your fingers hit the keyboard, take a moment to visualize the recipient in a positive and happy way (yeah, I know, there are some exceptions…) and then draft accordingly.

When you’re finished, go back and blow away all the bombast and chaff, and finally read it as if it had come from someone else into your inbox. Only then, hit “send”.

This actually takes only seconds, but the benefit to your reputation can last for years.

(Dedicated to my friend Bob, the foe of ghastly e-mail.)