Defense Does Speak a Separate Language

Quite often, when I read an acronym-laden Defense Department document I am convinced that folks in the military speak a language that bears only a passing resemblance to English.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which would like to tap into the military's experience with trauma care, finds Defense-speak difficult to penetrate. It put out a contract notice for a vendor with "unique and highly specialized skills" to translate military medical innovations into "civilian language."

This, of course, leaves me wondering if civilian language, which evidently CDC speaks, is yet another offshoot of the English the rest of us speak.

To paraphrase George Bernard Shaw -- or was it Oscar Wilde or Winston Churchill, we may have ended with a government divided from its people by a common language.