Sunday 22 November 2009

Quotes that characterise the European Union

Nothing better than clear statements anyone can understand:
"The EUMC recognizes the co-ordinated effort of the Wise Pen, EDA, EUMS, CEUMC, DGE VIII, DGE IX, CPCC, DGA5 and Joint SITCEN in producing this mature draft NEC Concept."
Source: Military Advice on the draft EU Concept for Network Enabled Capabilities (NEC) in support of ESDP (13 November 2009)

PS.: And in the first comment to this post you can find the same sentence as a hyperlink story.

4 comments:

Julien Frisch said...

And here is the same text as a hyperlink story:

"The EUMC recognizes the co-ordinated effort of the Wise Pen, EDA, EUMS, CEUMC, DGE VIII, DGE IX, CPCC, DGA5 and Joint SITCEN in producing this mature draft NEC Concept."

Oscarcio said...

Julien I think you are right EU must simplify its political complicated language to make it closer to citizens. Moreover most of the documents are in English, French and oft in German. What can a men/woman from Rumania think about most of the laws which come from the EP?

I hope that the new faces in the EU: Van Rompuy and Ashton make more attractive and simple the EU for citizens but as you already said in "Chasing Brussels"`s podcast for such unknown names (for media and people) They will have a huge task! let`s see what They finally do!

Dick Nieuwenhuis said...

Julie, this is a bit of a cheap one, I think. Any organsation, include private business ones, produce such things on technical subjects. The documents describing the wiring of your TV that you find in the box aren't any better. Even the sometimes coded language on Twitter is abacadabra for outsiders.
The simple question is of the public at large would be reading this (or better wanting to read this) for breakfast?
Every organisation has shortcut for long words, eg. HR/VP for High Representative/Vice-President. And even those words are meaningless for Joe the Plumber.
Let's not waste our time on such things but on the big picture.
How do our political leaders talk about Europe and its citizens?

Julien Frisch said...

Dick,

I agree on the cheap one, because this was really easy.

My point was rather in my first comment and the reference to the hyperlink story:

The institutions should move to a point where those terms and abbreviations get linked (e.g. automatically) in their digital documents, because in principle any citizens should be able to read political documents of the institutions and understand their basic meanings.

But the example was cheap, that is true - the reason I used it was the sentence as such, because after all the abbreviations they were talking about a "mature" draft concept, which looked so funny.