Officialese

Officialese is a word, phrase or grammatical construction characteristic of the official-business style that finds its way into an environment unusual for it — literary, journalistic or colloquial — and is perceived there as stylistically alien: "the aforementioned," "to take place," "in connection with the absence of." In business speech officialese is appropriate as a means of standardisation, but outside it, it makes the text dry, cumbersome, impersonal. In literature officialese is used deliberately — for the satirical characterisation of a bureaucrat, the exposure of formulaic thinking or the creation of a comic effect. The unmotivated penetration of officialese into literary and journalistic speech is considered a stylistic flaw. Officialese is a subject of stylistics and the culture of language in the aspect of the appropriateness of linguistic means in different functional styles.