Britain’s Plain English Campaign has awarded its Foot in Mouth award to US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for his attempt at clarification on the hunt for weapons of mass destruction.
“Reports that say something hasn’t happened are 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.”
Plain English spokesman John Lister said: “We think we know what he means. But we don’t know if we really know.”
I Just thought it was quite funny. I don’t want to wade into the Iraq debate as like the abortion debate nobody changes their mind and I believe most americans and foreigners for that matter make their political and important issue decisions (iraq, taxes, civil liberties, etc…) based on their internal value/belief systems rather then their conscious assumption that they know more then the people on the other side of the argument). The endless arguments on this off-topic forum tend to prove that!
I thought the original statement is pretty easy to follow, but then I did well on word problems in math. Not everyone has that much of an attention span I guess.
If I belonged to the group that voted for that, I’d be embarrassed. “I’m too dumb to follow it, therefore it must be foot-in-the-mouth.” They can’t tell me that there aren’t worse ones out there, many probably right from Rumsfeld himself.
I thought it was pretty clear actually, especially for an extemporaneous answer to a question from the press. It isn’t as if that came from a speechwriter.
Think about the concept, and see if that wasn’t a pretty good formulation given the circumstances.
BTW, off topic, I love how people sit back and try to pick apart things people say off-the-cuff. I am quite positive that if anyone followed around any of these silly journalists, they would hear them say some pretty stupid-sounding things. I know I say things sometimes that are the opposite of what I am thinking – such as looking at one person and saying the name of someone else. Little gaffes like that are quite common, and really have no bearing whatsoever on the intelligence of the speaker.
