One expects when working for the government, the Federal government especially, to be overwhelmed with acronyms. I was not disappointed. In fact, to use performance evaluation terminology, the experience Exceeded Expectations. From Outside the Beltway it is viewed as humorous, at best, to down right dangerous to speak in acronyms: I work in HHS/ASPR in the IPI group recently reorganized into the IHSD. This sentence is entirely true, and the layman can get the general sense if not the detail. One clearly has an accelerated irreversible acronymia infection (AIAI) when the rather mild symptoms (as the first example) progress into sentences such as the following: The SOC PHEICd the IPAPI incident for USG by NRF authority. This is clearly an advanced stage of infection compared with the first example; however, the key symptom is not the number of acronyms, nor the incomprehensibility of the sentence. The telltale symptom is making an acronym into a verb—I PHEIC; you PHEIC; he, she, it PHEICs, etc.
So I have come to the point where I can understand a sentence like the PHEIC one. Not quickly. It takes time to sink in. It’s a case of knowing a language’s grammar fairly well, but having only a small vocabulary. So I find myself at staff meetings or, worse, my own policy development team meetings, wishing I had a USGese to English dictionary. Ironic, isn’t it, that one of the appendices to the policy I am developing is a glossary of acronyms. That is necessary because this place makes the Balkans look like the poster child for cultural unity. Not only are there discrete dialects from department to department, but from one office to the next on the same floor within the same department. A great deal of the pain in governmental re-organization (such as forming the Dept of Homeland Security, DHS, from scores of offices in multiple departments) is vocabulary training. We are still suffering from the consolidation of all national security under one officer who reports to the President (witness the Underwear Bomber incident). The public blame is given to software and information dispersal (even to one office considering another as “the enemy”), but much of that is really the difficulty that people in one village nestled deep in a mountainous country have in understanding the citizens of the village in the next valley over, people who have been separated for thousands of years—the very definition of Balkanization.
Well, this note has gotten a lot more serious than I intended. Sometimes the fingers know a lot more about what I’m thinking than I am conscious of. I started this blog piece based on an experience last evening when I attended a presentation of a fellow Fellow who had been detailed to Haiti six weeks after the earthquake (EQ). She is at USAID and has a specialty she called poopology, but she describes in her LinkedIn page as wastewater microbiology. With her was another USAID field agent who was much more fluent in USGese, though they took great care to backup and translate each time they used USAID dialect. However, without translation he laid one on us that left all of us flummoxed, WOG. It turned out that this was a newly-coined acronym (USGese is a living language). It was coined because Haiti presented a novel situation for the USG, the involvement of all of the USG in one mission, thus WOG—Whole of Government. (Imagine that, it took two centuries for all the USG horses to pull the same way. If that one flies, I have a bridge to sell you.)
For those whose Google efforts fail to find meaningful translations of the introductory USGese sentences please contact me or Comment and I will provide an Outside the Beltway (OTB?) version. [BTW, OTB has a different meaning in NYC.]
In Google use searches with this structure: definition PHEIC
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PS- I analyzed the text above for its reading ease, per Word app under Tools**.
Sentences per Paragraph 7.0
Words/Sentence 21
Passive Voice 10%
Flesch Reading Ease 49.1
Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 11.0
** Results may vary OTB.
At seven sentences per paragraph, this blog is beyond the expectations of the USAToday reader. Twenty-one words per sentence is fairly typical for me; I guess it’s to save periods and upper case letters. Passive Voice is something I try to avoid, though here I believe it helps demonstrate how no one is really responsible; Acronyms Happen. Reading Ease is half way between Dr Seuss and a PhD thesis. Grade Level tops out at 12.0, the high school graduate, but this seems antiquated because we know that so many high school grads lurk down near the Seuss level.
PPS- Evaluating the blog after the addition of the PS increased the ease 2% and decreased the grade level 0.5.
