If a speaker gives you the urge to shout “Get on with it!”, it’s likely they are committing the sin of ‘circumlocution’ – making their point in a rambling, roundabout way rather than getting straight to the heart of the matter. People guilty of circumlocution (also called periphrasis) typically employ unnecessarily long words, often incorrectly or inappropriately, in circuitous, unwieldy sentences. This frustrating trait is sometimes a deliberate ploy to appear intellectual or authoritative but can also be inadvertent when we struggle to find the precise word we want.
It perhaps won’t surprise you to know that politicians are notorious culprits and the former US President George Bush Senior was well-known for it. Here’s an infamous example from a speech in which he defends his accomplishments in office:
“I see no media mention of it but we entered in – you asked what time it is and I’m telling you how to build a watch here – but we had Boris Yeltsin in here the other day and I think of my times campaigning in Iowa years ago and how there was a – I single out Iowa, it’s kind of an international state in a sense and has a great interest in all these things – and we had Yeltsin standing here in the Rose Garden and we entered into a deal to eliminate the biggest and most threatening ballistic missiles. . . and it was almost, ‘Ho hum, what have you done for me recently?’”
Now, obviously you don’t want to be guilty of such hideous miscommunication so next week I’ll bring you a crib sheet of common long-winded phrases to avoid. But if you can’t wait that long, email me for a copy!
