Lumbering Lingo

The lingo used by sociologists and such annoys many reasonable people. Richard D. Fay of M.I.T. is one of them. Last week the Washington Star picked up a letter he had written to the Harvard Alumni Bulletin in which he showed how the "Gettysburg Address" would sound, lumbered up in that lingo:

"Eight and seven-tenths decades ago, the pioneer workers in this continental area implemented a new group based on an ideology of free boundaries and initial conditions of equality. We are now actively engaged in an overall evaluation of conflicting factors . . . We are met in an area of maximum activity among the conflicting factors . . . to assign permanent positions to the units which have been annihilated in the process of attaining a steady state. This procedure represents standard practice at the administrative level.

"From a more comprehensive viewpoint, we cannot assign -- we cannot integrate -- we cannot implement this area . . . The courageous units, in being annihilated . . . have integrated it to the point where the application of simple arithmetical operations to include our efforts would produce only negligible effects . . .

"It is preferable for this group to be integrated with the incompleted implementation . . . that we here resolve at a high ethical level that the deceased shall not have been annihilated without furthering the project -- that this group . . . shall implement a new source of unhampered activity-- and that political supervision composed of the integrated units, for the integrated units, and by the integrated units shall not perish from . . . this planet."

In Washington last week, the Air Force tried to describe some new electronics equipment. "Special emphasis," it announced "has been placed on miniaturization and ruggedization." Meaning: the equipment will be smaller and tougher.

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