Corpus Analysis of Gobbledygook

In July 2013, the British Civil Service issued a new style guide for is online documents, Government Digital Service Content Principles. This guide included a list of 37 words and expressions that were to be avoided by policy document authors. In this contribution I discuss how these term are used in policy documents (in a corpus of all policy documents published on www.gov.uk in 2013), and attempt to connect this with (i) the choice of expressions listed, (ii) the definitions provided next to many of them, suggesting what their ‘proper’ meaning is, i.e. how they should be used, and (iii) if those explicitly listed as metaphors “to be avoided” are in fact metaphorical.