Straight to the point

We’ve often made fun of bureaucratic jargon and encouraged the use of straight-forward American English by public officials and in government documents.

So, we got a smile from an email that a reader recently sent. It contained a quote from an anonymous author that went: “The Ten Commandments contain 297 words, the Bill of Rights 463 words, and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address 266 words. A recent federal directive regulating the price of cabbage contains 26,911 words.”

That certainly tells us a lot about our times.

And in just 30 words.