Peter Metcalfe on bureaucratese...
The latest example, so I've been told, is the Scott Report in England which uses double and quadruple negatives to avoid making
>> Lord Justice Scott is a High Court Judge not a bureacrat.
For instance where the normal person would say:
I am convinced the Ministers misled parliment.
becomes in Scottspeak:
I am not convinced that the Ministers did not mislead Parliment.
>> Here Peter Metcalfe makes the Pythonesque mistake of using the unary negative
operator on both the antecedent and consequent of the binary operator of logical
implication which of course leads to a sylloligistic equivalence of the two
Horne Clauses rather than a logical equivalence embeddable in a semantic model
of ones logical and axiomatic syntactical symbolic language or variable
referents.
>> Obviously one should use the contrapositive construction to preserve the
semantic mapping.
>> Thus
I am not convinced that the Ministers did not mislead Parliament
>> can be readily rephrased using English semantic substitutions, which are
inherently ( due to soundness of course)
I cannot prove that the Ministers mislead Parliament.
>>Of course those in the know would realise that these aren't Horn clauses but
would be more correctly phrased as propositions in a variant of modal logic....
Argh gasp
mindless babble (erm more mindless babble actually)
'Clive Ponting was allegedly in breach of the official secrets act'
(ILLUMINATION STRIKES) I see all...I shall serve the lunar way from inside the empire by not cross referencing reports from Prax hahahahahah.
[This excerpt is liberally interpreted from the late pedant, logician and bureaucrat crucified by the 'Bring Back Morthander Deville club' after a short theological debate]
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