Word Woman

Welcome to another astounding episode of Word Woman's Weekly Work-Out! In honor of the International Olympic games going on even as we speak in Beijing, here is a term which relates to governmental bureaucracy, an unavoidable symptom of running a country of any significant size:

FOG: Frequency Of Gobbledygook in government publications, etc. Both the British and the United States governments have spawned various bureaucratic languages that have been described as gobbledygook, a term coined in 1944. The FOG index determines how much gobbledygook a particular government publication contains. Not to be outdone by the "feds", the city governments throughout the United States have generated their own variety of gobbledygook known as URBABABBLE. While the government in Washington, D.C. specializes in BUREAUCRATESE and PENTAGONESE, a name for the jargon of the American military industrial complex that entered the language in 1952, the language of the British government is criticized and corrected by the Plain English Society, which deplores gobbledygook. -- "Kind Words: A Thesaurus of Euphemisms", Judith S. Neaman and Carole G. Silver, McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1985.

Example: The FOG index tends to be particularly high in government economic publications during times of recession.