Whilst I appreciate the Plain English Campaign's originally stated mission to discourage the use of unnecessarily opaque terminology, I think this is straying from the mark a bit. There's nothing wrong with having a decent vocabulary, as long as you can make yourself understood.
Personally I find the 'Newspeak' habit of replacing huge swathes of vocabulary with one or two tired phrases to be a much more annoying trend. eg:
"reached out" --instead of 'wrote to', 'contacted', 'emailed', 'phoned', etc.
"awesome" --instead of 'good', 'fine', 'great', 'useful', 'helpful', 'thrilling', 'exciting'... or almost any adjective that expresses pleasure.
"super" --which, likewise, seems to be becoming the universal adjective to replace 'very', 'extremely', 'rather', 'quite', etc.
God help us. Of late, I've even seen a rise in people describing things as "super awesome"!
'Reached out' is top of my list on written annoyances.
Top of my list for verbal annoyances is 'beginning your answer to every question with "So..." which seems to have reached epidemic proportions [over here in UK anyway] in TV and radio interviews:
Q: And what is the government's response to this?
A: So... What we've said...
Q: I believe you've been to France?
A: So... I went to France last year...
Q: What age are you?
A: So... I'll be 45 next August
It's one of those things that, once you start noticing it, you can't stop. I actually find myself tensing in anticipation now, when someone is being asked a question. Waiting for the inevitable "So..." in response.
On the upside, it does make picking whose side I'm on in a debate that much easier. First person to come out with "So..." is immediately assumed to be a wanker and in the wrong. This is not as shallow as it may sound, as the verbal tic seems particularly beloved of politicians and spokespersons for various money-grabbing organisations.
Yeah, but...like...that's not nearly as annoying as...like, you know...those Americans who...like...umm...do that thing with "like"...uhh...like practically between every clause. And I should know, because...like...I'm American too, and it gets...like...totally grating sometimes.
Featuring such mind-bogglingly difficult words like "advise", "consult", "depict", "desire" and "locate". Someone evidently neglected to read their Orwell when they were assigned it as required reading in school. And they do document review, to boot, evidently on a mission to suck all the color out of the English language.
How do they think people learn words other than by encountering them in the wild? Nobody reads a dictionary for fun. That's exactly how I learned words as a child. It's natural, and it's ok.
More broadly, I don't understand this modern trend of trying not to expose people to things they don't understand or leaving things unclear at times. Isn't that one of the small yet magical things in life? Coming across something unfamiliar? Whether mundane; a word you don't know, or maybe a subtle play on words that the reader only picks up on in a subsequent reading, a small reference that someone only gets later when consuming other media, or something more specialized, like a scene in a movie making reference to events the viewer hasn't seen. Getting answers through effort, piecing a mystery together yourself or filling narrative gaps with your imagination is, in my opinion, part of the core experience of consuming media and living.
I see translators struggle with these ideas, and there is a tension between camps on whether things like puns and references to local cultural understandings should be replaced with equivalent ones in the target language or translated verbatim at the risk of confusing the viewer/reader. Personally, I lean to the latter.
> your attention is drawn to—please see, please note
> participate—join in, take part
I salute the goal ("hereinafter" should not be a word in 2022), but this list is poorly considered and often just substitutes one regional construct for another. How is "take part" more clearly understood than "participate"? It's not.
When I worked at an international institution, we had a joke that for every 100 words in English, 40 of them were accepted International English. It's true that jargon and regionalisms are confusing and exclusive, and that you need to consider your audience before writing something like "the client directive constrains us to utilize the Befangennam algorithm", but the actual solution offered here is way off.
Personally I find the 'Newspeak' habit of replacing huge swathes of vocabulary with one or two tired phrases to be a much more annoying trend. eg:
"reached out" --instead of 'wrote to', 'contacted', 'emailed', 'phoned', etc.
"awesome" --instead of 'good', 'fine', 'great', 'useful', 'helpful', 'thrilling', 'exciting'... or almost any adjective that expresses pleasure.
"super" --which, likewise, seems to be becoming the universal adjective to replace 'very', 'extremely', 'rather', 'quite', etc.
God help us. Of late, I've even seen a rise in people describing things as "super awesome"!