OWW CH16

WORD

Information can be imparted clearly and without pomposity.

1.impart

vt.to give information, knowledge, wisdom etc to someone

She had information that she couldn’t wait to impart.have

2.pomposity

n.the quality of being pompous; ostentation; self-importance.

... or with inert constructions in which nobody can be visualized doing something: “pre-feasibility studies are in the paperwork stage.”

3.inert

adj.not willing to do anything:

Nobody has made the point better than George Orwell in his translation into modern bureaucratic fuzz of this famous verse from Ecclesiastes:

4.fuzz

n. a blur

she saw Jess surrounded by a fuzz of sunlight.她看见杰斯被模糊不清的日光环绕着。

Gone is any sense of what one person did (“I returned”) or what he realized (“saw”) about one of life’s central mysteries: the capriciousness of fate.

5.capriciousness

thequality of being changeable and variable

In the national clamor over why Johnny can’t write

6.clamor

n.a loud, sustained noise

Scholarship hath no fury like that of a language purist faced with sludge,

7.sludge

sludge is thick mud, sewage, or industrial waste.

Beware of all the slippery new fad words:

8.fad

Afashion that is taken up with great enthusiasm for a brief period of time;a craze.

We are suspicious of pretentiousness, of all the fad words that the social scientists have coined to avoid making themselves clear to ordinary mortals.

9.coin

vt. To devise (a new word or phrase).

和CH7出现的mint一个意思。

10.mortal

n. You can describe someone as amortal when you want to say that they are an ordinary person.

His message could have been tapped out by a computer.

11.tap

If you tap something, you hit it with a quick light blow or a series of quick light blows.

He is squandering a rich resource: himself.

12.squander

to spend or use wastefully or extravagantly

The second paragraph, in short, is warm and personal; the other is pedantic and vague.

13.pedantic

If you think someone ispedantic, you mean that they are too concerned with unimportant details or traditional rules, especially in connection with academic subjects.

【语用信息】：disapproval

His lecture was sopedanticand uninteresting.

他的讲座学究气太浓，没意思。

Many of you would be totally dismayed if you could observe the manners of your children while they are eating.

14.dismay

to make afraid or discouraged at the prospect of trouble or danger; fill with apprehension or alarm; daunt

The thought that she was cryingdismayed him.

想到她正在流泪，他伤心不已。

I recited my four articles of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity.

15.brevity

the quality of being concise; terseness

brevity指简短，simplicity指简单易懂。

I told them not to use the special vocabulary of education as a crutch

16.crutch

(腿或脚受伤的人用的)腋杖，拐杖 Acrutchis a stick whose top fits round or under the user's arm, which someone with an injured foot or leg uses to support their weight when walking.

Perhaps that’s why bureaucratic prose becomes so turgid, whatever the bureaucracy.

17.turgid

能被表示程度的副词或介词词组修饰的形容词（文章、电影等）晦涩难懂的，索然无味的 If you describe something such as a piece of writing or a film asturgid, you think it is boring and difficult to understand.

I distributed my copies and asked the principals to rewrite the more knotty sentences.

18.knotty

adj.hard to solve or explain; puzzling

There is a deep yearning for human contact and a resentment of bombast.

19.yearning

n. deep or anxious longing, desire, etc.

我觉得这里deep是多余的，因为yearning本身有deep的含义

There is a deep yearning for human contact and a resentment of bombast.

20.bombast

n. talk or writing that sounds grand or important but has little meaning; pompous language(disapproval)

Any organization that won’t take the trouble to be both clear and personal in its writing will lose friends, customers and money.

21.take the trouble to do sth

to make an effort to do something(that one might not otherwise do).

费心做某事，不辞辛劳做某事

I wish I had taken the trouble to study this matter more carefully. I just didn't have enough time to take the trouble.

That sentence is no favor to the customer; it’s congealed with Orwellian nouns like “capacity” and “capabilities” that convey no procedures that a customer can picture.

22.congeal

to thicken; coagulate; jell

They replied that this was easier said than done in hierarchical corporations, where approval of written reports is required at a succession of higher levels.

23.hierarchical

等级制度的;等级森严的 Ahierarchicalsystem or organization is one in which people have different ranks or positions, depending on how important they are.

If they and their institutions seem cold, it’s because they acquiesce in the process of being pumped up and dried out.

24.acquiesce

to agree or consent quietly without protest, but without enthusiasm: often within[toacquiescein a decision]

SYN.-consent

THOUGHT

Gone from the second one are the short words and vivid images of everyday life—the race and the battle, the bread and the riches—and in their place have waddled the long and flabby nouns of generalized meaning.如果是我会写the short...are gone from the second one，学到了。以及破折号真的很好用啊。

官方文件总是用词含糊，句子冗长，让人完全看不下去。有很多文件都是故意写成那样的，存心让人看不懂，故弄高深。没有人情味，不用“我”或“我们”更是一种逃避的表现。文中的校长们意识到这个问题并去学习写作，这个勇气值得点赞。好的写作应当秉持着clarity, simplicity, brevity and humanity的原则。