In the same connection, let us remember that the last few years have seen much newspaper wit at the expense of the language of government bureaucracy, which is even more responsive to the melioristic bias. The bureaucrat lives in a world where nothing is incorrigible; the solution to every contemporary difficulty waits only for the devising of some appropriate administrative machinery. Compared with him, the social scientist is a realist, for social science at least begins by admitting that many situations leave something to be desired. The bureaucrat’s world is prim and proper and aseptic, and his language reflects it (perhaps one could say that the discourse of the bureaucrat is social science “politicalized”). At any rate, here we might profitably look at a specimen of bureaucratic parlance from Masterson and Phillips’ _Federal Prose_, a recently published burlesque of official language. The authors posed for themselves as one exercise the problem of how a bureaucrat would express the ancient adage “Too many cooks spoil the broth.” Their translation is a caricature, but, like caricature, it brings out the dominant features of the subject: “Undue multiplicity of personnel assigned either concurrently or consecutively to a single function involves deterioration of quality in the resultant product as compared with the product of the labor of an exact sufficiency of personnel.”[165] One notices, first of all, the leap into polysyllabic diction, along with the total disappearance of those homely entities “cooks” and “broth.” “Personnel,” for example, is an abstract dignifier, and “resultant product” is safe, since it does not leave the writer on record as affirming that the concoction in question actually is broth. He is further protected by the expunging of “spoil,” with its positive assertion, and he can hide behind the relativity of “deterioration of quality ... as compared with....”