Their fight against ‘gobbledygook, jargon and misleading public information´ has seen the Plain English Campaign (PLE) crusade against everything from ´deliberately vague parking signs´ to ´maddening instruction manuals,´ but has the organisation´s founder Chrissie Maher (OBE as anyone visiting the PLE site is generously reminded) and her team gone a step too far with their latest target, the humble sausage roll?
The perpetrator of this latest assault against the English language is the Co-op, the protagonist a slice of spiced pork wrapped in fluffy pastry, which the supermarket chain had been flogging to its customers under the banner: ´Ambient Sausage Roll.´
After being contacted by ´bemused´ members of the public questioning the use of ´ambient,´ in this culinary context, Maher (OBE don’t forget) sprung into action: ´These sausage rolls have escaped from the technical production lines of the food industry to bring confusion and ruin the ambiance of our lunch breaks,´ she raged.
A phone call or two later and the Co-op were in full retreat, their spokesperson explaining: ´the use of the word ambiance on the label of this product was an administrative error,´ that was ´being rectified.´ They offered ´apologies for the confusion´ that legions of shoppers must have suffered.
While the Daily Telegraph described the Co-op´s grovelling reaction as ´a small victory for plain English,´ Robert McNeil at the Belfast Telegraph, reminded us that any colour in an often grey and bureaucratic world, should be soaked up and embraced: ´I’d have bought the ambient sausage in a trice. It sounds so wonderfully New Age. I can see myself in soft focus, ambling bare-foot through a field of flowers towards a stream. I sit down by the water, dangling my feet. A warm sun overhead strokes and smoothes my face. I am in heaven full of bliss, I take out my ambient sausage roll and munch into it, spilling flakes of pastry on the grass´
While the PLE can be congratulated for tackling jargon deliberately employed to mislead or confuse, in this instance, the Co-op should have issued a two-fingered response and rushed out a comprehensive range of products under the heading ´ambient´ in similar fashion to rival food pushers´ ´Simply the Best´ or ´Finest´ products.
Instead it has been subdued by an organisation whose staff profiles read like a Who’s Who of people you’d least want turning up at a party, including PLE General Manager Tony Maher (formerly a head of chemistry at a secondary school and printing company manager) and Training and Development Manager, John Wild, a former science teacher who went on to manage quality assurance in the chemical industry and was proudly in charge of drafting ISO 9000 (don´t ask) quality manuals.
