Most writers aspire to clarity in language. Politicians, of course, are the exception. Legislators are turning to language to obscure their intentions, claims Steven Poole over at the Guardian. Poole cites a trade deal between the EU and the United States that confounds the issue of tariffs known as TTIP:

One might be forgiven for concluding from this, and in general from the obfuscatory and often downright misleading bureaucratese in which TTIP’s aims are framed, that they are trying to hide something. However, the official TTIP literature itself relentlessly invokes the modish political virtue of “transparency”. They must mean some kind of perfectly opaque transparency that would surely be of interest to scientists researching new smart materials. Or perhaps, after all, they are just trying to pull some very thick wool over our eyes.