Last week, a full-page ad appeared in my morning newspaper titled, “An Open Letter to Canadians.” The subheadline began with “CBC.” Omigawd, Paul Martin’s abolishing the CBC, I thought.

Then I read the piece, after which I was not appalled but ….. embarrassed. It was signed, and indeed written, a CBC spokesman confirms, by Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president at CBC Television, and Jane Chalmers, vice-president at CBC Radio.

I credit Mr. Stursberg and Ms. Chalmers for refusing to deny authorship. It would have been easy to blame a PR underling for writing an essay that would have earned me a D in Grade 13 for its ineptitude and defilement of the English language as it is written and spoken by, well, people who write and speak English.

In fact, I hauled out my Grade 13 history exam on the Winnipeg General Strike to compare it with CBC management’s ad, paid for with my taxes. I should have been running the CBC when I was 17 on my grammar skills alone.

The “open letter” was a giant splat of euphemisms, jargon, pointless repetition, self-contradiction and cliché but, perhaps most important, incomprehensibility, as if someone had thrown a cream pie at the newspaper page and just let it drip.

So we will turn to the person who understood language crimes better than any writer, George Orwell, the inventor of Newspeak, the language of intrinsic lies spoken in the novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell nailed his complaints to the church door in a famous essay called Politics and the English Language, published in 1946, an essay I often read after studying my own prose with some pain.

Orwell believed that political language (he was not referring to literature) should be clear. He singled out staleness of imagery and lack of precision, while offering five examples of rhetoric and explaining with his customary clarity why they were poisonous porridge.

I quote No. 5, pompous blither from a postwar critic of the BBC: “If a new spirit is to be infused into this cold country, there is one thorny and contentious reform which must be tackled and that is the humanization and galvanization of the BBC.”

But compare it to the CBC letter: “If the CBC is going to survive, we have to be where Canada’s techno-savvy and culturally diverse population already are, providing public broadcasting they want, when and where they want it.”

I have no idea what either passage means. I assume that the BBC figured things out after the Second World War; it’s the most popular news service on the planet and run by clever people who mind their prose. I’ve heard them speak. They extemporize on a dime. They offer high and low culture, running programs titled, Pirandello: A New View, right after a sitcom in which Kate Winslet refers to penises as “purple-headed womb ferrets.”

Why can’t the CBC twins be more BBC-like?

Mr. Stursberg and Ms. Chalmers pose unanswered questions. The CBC is near death? Who are these fab techies from many nations and where do they reside? The Banff Springs Hotel? You say the CBC is not there with them. Is there a “there” there? If so, why is the CBC not present? I don’t follow. As for the nation’s CBC-receiving TVs, radios and computers not being where Canadians want them, can’t they just put them in another room?

The CBC duo say that “CBC management is committed to ….. [ellipsis for reasons of boredom] using public funds responsibly and effectively.” If the CBC used money responsibly, it wouldn’t be effective? A failure to grasp this suggests fiscal incompetence, which may be why your ad cost me a bundle while the CBC union’s ad was half a page and included the clear statement that behind the dispute “is the Corporation’s need to increase the number of contract employees it hires in the future.”

(By the way, when management locks out its staff and then runs a letter this foolish, all that happens is your employees, unionized and contract, both hate you. They just each go about it in a slightly different way.)

As for the statement that “the CBC must become a much more flexible, agile, nimble operation,” that’s called overdosing on Roget’s Thesaurus, a result of which is my vision of Mr. Stursberg and Ms. Chalmers hiring a bunch of unemployed, prepubescent gymnasts from Romania to produce The National. Reporters will end every interview with: “But ultimately what does this mean for the Walachian leather industry? Only time will tell.”

Orwell wrote that the English language “becomes ugly and inaccurate because our thoughts are foolish, but the slovenliness of our language makes it easier for us to have foolish thoughts.” He believed that this was reversible if intelligent people identified nonsense as nonsense, refused to write it and complained about having it forced upon them.

I lack the space to give you his six rules to shame any writer into housecleaning her rhetoric, but the essay is published by Penguin Classics. Buy it, Richard and Jane. Be very ashamed.

I will close with their prose climax: “We remain hopeful and determined [which is it?] that the outcome ….. [reason as above] will be an agreement that respects our employees, reflects contemporary [not ancient?] realities, embodies the true [not false, then] spirit of public broadcasting [cheap?], and positions the CBC to be a strong, relevant and effective service that will be used and valued by Canadians for many years to come.”

I didn’t expect you to suggest that the CBC be a “weak, pointless and ineffective service that will be ignored and ridiculed by Canadians for as long as it survives.”

But all you needed to say was you want to hire temps who won’t get health benefits.

So why didn’t you?