A commonly heard refrain from officialdom:

Smoking and the use of e-cigarettes is prohibited at any time whilst on board.

About a decade ago, I was asked to comment on some public health messaging around e-cigarettes. There was—and still is—debate about the trade-offs: there’s clear harm reduction compared to smoking, but increased prevalence might bring new harms, as using these products is more harmful than choosing to do neither.

My concern, though, was about language. I’d never heard anyone outside the health world refer to them as e-cigarettes—people talked about vapes. The odds of a media campaign landing seem vanishingly small if it doesn’t use the language its audience actually speaks.

Others disagreed. They wanted to maintain an explicit association between these devices and the harms of cigarette smoking. In their view, calling them e-cigarettes was a helpful way to reinforce that link.

As it happens, I lost that argument—but I think history has vindicated me. The only time I hear e-cigarettes mentioned these days is in what I think of as official communic-ese—that peculiar dialect of unnatural, stilted phrasing found in corporate scripts and organisational policies. As above, whilst often falls into this category too.

Another ‘official’ script from a certain company includes the line:

Electronic devices with a ‘flight safe’ mode feature should have this enabled now.

‘Flight safe mode feature’? It’s such an ugly and unnecessary noun-phrase it makes me wince slightly every time I hear it. It’s not uncommon to hear whoever’s reading it stumble.

The basic function of this sort of scripted communication is, well, to communicate. Yet, it’s astonishing how frequently these messages are signed off, duplicated in their thousands, and broadcast across the world without anyone pausing to ask whether they’ll actually land. If the words don’t sound like something a real person would ever say—or hear—then they probably aren’t doing the job.

The image at the top was created with GPT-4o. AI image generation’s handling of text has clearly improved considerably of late.