Then I thought a little more about this hypothetical reporter, caught between the two cardinal sins of langue de bois and macaronic pretension, which called up a mental picture of an anguished man sitting at a table with a pile of woodchips on one side and a bowl of macaroni on the other.
I was about to write that “ langue de bois ” is a term every political journalist should know, but then I figured that anyone professionally obliged to treat this kind of sentence seriously must already be feeling quite enough contempt for himself and for the English language, and forcing him to use a fancy foreign term would only serve to compound both. This non-language is generally used when functionaries - up to and including heads of state - have soundbite-sized banalities they want to express and whole paragraphs to express them in, leaving us with something like “The nation’s people desire economic development, and those benchmarks are being met as rapidly as the fundamentals will allow, which is very rapidly, because the people’s desire is invincible and the fundamentals are stronger than ever.” The nouns and verbs are soothing, but the syntax is designed to repel any effort you might make at paying attention. La langue de bois, “the wooden tongue,” is a very useful French term for platitudinous windbaggery that combines the worst qualities of politician-speak and bureaucratese.