A lot of rhubarb...
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Your support makes all the difference.At the end of this month Plain English Campaign's director, Chrissie Maher, will be lecturing in Brussels as part of the European Commission's Fight the Fog programme.
No doubt Europe will continue to provide British consumers with plenty of impenetrable prose. But there is plenty of home-grown gobbledegook, too.
Richard Hunter, managing director of London independent financial advisers Holden Meehan, picks a section from a local council's employee pension scheme booklet as his own favourite example. It reads:
"The calculation of the death grant is slightly different if the employee was in receipt of a pension as a result of a frozen benefit coming into payment or if he retires in the income tax year he would have attained state retirement age and had less than two years reckonable and qualifying service."
Mr Hunter says: "I find it quite annoying that normal people, who are not involved in this sort of stuff, have to make their way through massive sentences like that."
If it's massive sentences you're after, a recent resolution from a Scottish Amicable Investment Managers' AGM takes some beating. This runs to a punctuation- free 174 words, and holds the 1997 Silver Rhubarb award. The Rhubarbs are given each year by the Plain Language Commission, another clarity watchdog.
The resolution reads:
"That in substitution for any existing power under section 95 of the Companies Act 1985 (as amended and from time to time in force) ('the Act'), but without prejudice to the exercise of any such power prior to the date hereof, the Directors be and are hereby empowered pursuant to section 95 of the Act, to allot equity securities (as defined in section 94(2) of the Act) for cash pursuant to the authority contained in the Special Resolution dated 3rd April 1995 given in accordance with section 80 of the Act as if section 89(1) of the Act did not apply to any such allotment even if shares are allotted for cash at a price below the relevant net asset value per share provided that this power shall expire on 20th September 1998, save that the Company may before such expiry make an offer or agreement which would or might require equity securities to be allotted in pursuance of such offer or agreement as if the power conferred hereby had not expired."
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