How many words?
I was at a training course today, which has been interesting and quite useful in many ways. However in one place the trainer wanted to emphasise the ease with which one can end up waffling and writing unnecessary padding when producing official reports and specification documents. To illustrate this he used the following set of statistics:How many words are there in the Lord's Prayer? Answer: 37
How many words are there in the Ten Commandments? Answer: 319
How many words are there in the American Declaration of Independence? Answer: 300
How many words are there in the European Directive on the Transportation of Duck Eggs by Road? Answer: 26,911
Whoa! The inescapable conclusion is that they knew how to write short, concise documents in the olden days, whereas modern bureaucracies and committees just go mad.
But let's look at this in more detail.
First of all, how many words are there in the Lord's Prayer? Well Wikipedia gives two different English versions of that prayer, the first being the one I learned in school ("Our Father, which art in Heaven"), and the second a version in slightly more modern English. You can go there and count the number of words for yourself, but to save you doing so here are the figures: the first has 55 (or 69 if you include the "Thine is the Kingdom..." lines). The more modern version has 50 (64). Even in Latin -- a far more concise language than English -- the Lord's Prayer runs to 49 words!
The next claim is more correct, although you have to be rather specific when it comes to which Ten Commandments. They appear twice in the Bible (Exodus 20:2–17 and Deuteronomy 5:6–21), and there are many different translations of the Bible, even in English. But if you take the King James translation of the Exodus text it does indeed come to 319 words.
The American Declaration of Independence is a bit trickier. If you just take the main paragraph ("We hold these truths ... submitted to a candid world") I make that 270 words. If you take the entire preamble it's 341. If you take the full text, listing all the nasty and dictatorial things the King has done as well as the preamble, it comes to a whopping 1,322 words.
But that's still less than 10% of the EU's duck eggs directive. Those crazy Eurocrats eh, wasting our tax money on pointless and wordy committees and directives.
So, let's do the same for that document as we did for the others -- let's count the words.
Erm, one problem. That document doesn't exist. There is NO "Directive on the Transportation by Road of Duck Eggs" (or any similar wording) to be found anywhere on the European Union's website.
Well, maybe the EU's search engine is a bit pants. Let's ask the people who really know about web searching. Google. Yahoo! Ask.com. Follow the links if you like, or try it in other search engines. In all cases the only relevant links are places where people are quoting statistics similar to those my trainer mentioned and which I've written at the top of this post. And in almost every case it's by someone with an anti-EU drum to beat.
My conclusion? No such Directive exists. This whole thing is an urban myth propagated either accidentally or deliberately, by those who wish to demonstrate the lunacy of the EU.
Of course if anyone can find the Directive referred to I'd be more than happy to change my mind, but until then I can only conclude that anyone who quotes the above statistics is doing so parrot-fashion, without having done any original research of their own.
Labels: politics EU
posted by Iain @ 18:29
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