CouncilSpeak

2008: A number have councils have instructed their council staff to stop using latin phrases in their communications with the public as these are not understood by a minority of council taxpayers. Expressions such as QED, e.g. i.e. and indeed “exit”, a.m. atc will be replaced with anglo-saxon equivalents.

2012: In an extension of its policy of adapting communications for maximum comprehensibility councils have instructed staff to eliminate all words over three syllables.

2016: As part of their on-going policy of comprehensivising their external communications councils are instructing staff to eliminate all compound sentences. Words such as but, because, and indeed and may no longer be used and sentences should comprise no more than 10 words in the first instance, falling to 7 words by 2020.

2020: Giving the continuing difficulties in ensuring that all council taxpayers understand the Council message staff are now instructed to use no more than two syllables in any word and to consult the Council “Register of Acceptable Words”, newly-available to staff after a private consultancy report costing £500,000,000 funded by the National Lottery.

2021: Given the slowness observed in adopting the Councils’ latest communications policy staff are now instructed to pass all communications through the Councils’ Central Language Processor newly-installed at a knock-down price through bulk-purchase of £900 billion. This facility will stip out all unnecessary language and jargon from Councils’ communications.

2025: Given the continuing difficulties encountered in ensuring that all Countil taxpayers can fully understand our communications a condensed list of possibly phrases is being made available to staff to simplify their arduous task.

A limited number of essential standard phrases is now available, including the most frequently used and most useful: CT up 20% - fuck off.

2030: Given that a minority of our taxpayers continue to meet with difficulty comprehending our messages staff are being sent on training courses to learn the new Graphical Communications Interface Facility. Staff will be pleased to know that fees for these training courses of only $5,000 per employee have been negotiated with a major international consulting company, allowing us to reduce the proposed increase in CT for this year from 25% to 24.8%.

2035: Given that many taxpayers still find much of our oral communication incomprehensible staff will be sent on a training course to learn the new Simplified Non-Verbal Communications Language comprising mostly of grunts. The Council is anxious that staff should not be concerned that they will not be up to the acquisition of new skills (which naturally will be accompanied by large payrises to reflect the increase in productivity this will bring). The Training Manager is anxious to emphasize that the first sessions will deal entirely with mastering the basic grunts required. Without revealing too many secrets, and in the interests of maximizing the reassurance offered to our staff, we can reveal that the first week of this residential course in the Bahamas will comprise mastering one grunt for “No” and two for “Yes”.

As an indication of the advanced nature of this highly-refined new language, we should mention that the original version had one grunt for “Yes” and “Two” for “No”, but that this was reversed since the “No” version would clearly be the most frequently-used and therefore most economical.