Bolta on ‘Clever’ Kev

On 3AW this morning, Andrew Bolt had a bit of a go at clarifying a statement from one of Kevin Rudd’s latest speeches in the US.

Have a listen here, right at the beginning, especially you furriners who may not have ever had the pleasure of hearing what our new show-pony PM sounds like.

For the record, I’m with AB in that it brought to mind an Orwell quote, but here’s the one that came to my mind:

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.” (George Orwell)

[L]ong words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink … That’s Rudd-Speak in a nutshell.

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Update: Here’s what Kev actually said – “Therefore, there is, in my argument, on the face of it, a natural complementarity between these two philosophical approaches and a complementarity that could be developed further in the direction of some form of conceptual synthesis.”

Complementarity? Definition from Macquarie dictionary: “. . . a concept which acknowledges that different pieces of evidence relating to atomic systems, obtained under different conditions, cannot necessarily be understood by a single model, thus the concept of complementarity is necessary in order to accept the wave and particle models of an electron”.

Clearer now? Clear as cuttlefish ink…