I watched part of an interview a few days ago with Iain Duncan Smith (for US readers who might have overlooked him - heaven knows it's easy enough to do - he's the leader of the Conservative Party) and couldn't help noticing an especially annoying speech habit.

In the ten minutes I watched he was being interviewed about the mini-scandal (non-scandal actually, the whole thing being media driven rather than event driven) of employing his wife as a diaries secretary.

I can't recall his words verbatim but every sentence, almost without exception, started with

"What I'm saying to you is...",
"What I would say to them is...",
"The simple truth of the matter is...,"
"The fact is...",

or some other such meaningless noise. Had he omitted this drivel he would have sounded more intelligent, more believable and less irritating and the interview would have lasted about half the time.
As it was he sounded shifty, belligerent and rather dull-witted.


Does anyone else here get annoyed at this kind of nonsense?

Glaubt es mir - das Geheimnis, um die größte Fruchtbarkeit und den größten Genuß vom Dasein einzuernten, heisst: gefährlich leben.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

Oh, absolutely! "The fact of the matter is..." just kills me. What in the world is the point?
You are right that it makes the dullard seem even more dull!

I tried to find something about this on the Web, and found, instead, this rather humorous article, which belongs more in the "men vs. women" thread than here, but I really didn't want to resurrect that thread again.

This quote has been widely reported here in the last week. I know it's an old one but The Campaign For Plain English has awarded it a prize for gobbledygook.

It's from that well known humanitarian and all round nice guy (!) Donald Rumsfeld.

"Reports that say something hasn't happened ar always interesting to me because as we know there are known knowns - there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns - that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns - the ones we don't know we don't know."

The saddest thing of all is that my inner mathematician understands that perfectly and insists that he has missed out the unknown knowns - the things we don't know that we know.

Why should I let the toad work
Squat on my life ?
Can't I use my wit as a pitchfork
And drive the brute off ?
Read all about my travels around the world here.
Read even more of my travel writing and poems on my weblog.

It's all gobbledygook to me! You wonder how they get away with it. I tried to find more on the Web and could only come up with this audio page, which I can't listen to on my laptop. However, some of you might enjoy them!