Kollupitiya, Colombo (Japan Weekly): Employees at a local Sri Lankan NGO have launched a campaign to remove one of their co-workers, due to his extreme verbosity.

Our reporters met with staff at the local NGO, the Coalition for Regional Advancement Proposals (CRAP), who had the following to say:

“We are sick of this man. Every thing he says becomes a 10 paragraph lecture consisting of Shakespearean English. Now when you and I are going to toilet we say I go toilet now KTHXBYE

- this man he say ‘Please excuse me as I wish to avail myself of this opportunity to peruse the lavatorial services as I find myself encumbered with excessive waste and I wish to go ad astra per alia porci.‘

What sort of madness is this I ask you?? If he wanting go potty why cannot he be asking I want to go potty, instead of all that ‘ad astra per alia porci‘ mumbo jumbo, like normal persons, no?

- M, Lavatorial Technician

“Aney, you should see his company emails! Everything is a bloody headache to read - I am having to pick up a copy of ‘Revised Oxford English and Latin For Colonials’ dictionary, just to understand half the stuff he writes us. All his writings are peppered with big words like ‘parochial’, ‘Inextricably entwined’ and ‘fraternal triumvirate’ - come now who the hell uses such words no??

I don’t minding if he uses this languages in his research papers but when he runs out of toilet paper he sends us bloody strange messages like ‘It behooves you to supply me with more wood fiber based papyrus derivate, for I have exhausted all resources and am now unable to textually communicate via print’ - couldn’t the fellow just say ‘NEED TOILET PAPER??’ - we all know he’s good at English, but does he have to lord it over us so much?”

- S, Unit Head

“Well I am not too sure what all the fuss is about as I have never personally communicated with him, except for the one time someone stole his (mouse) balls: but we do have one problem - he is costing us an extra gigabyte or two in Internet bandwidth due to his excessive verbosity - we have had to get Telecom to install a special FIOS line to carry Dr. Sanjay’s written traffic alone.”

- J, IT Dept.

“The worst thing is when he gets a new gadget - like a phone. He goes around and shows it to us as if we have not seen a cell phone before - We are also having cell phones too you know?”

- M, Legal Dept

“Look, we are not asking for much - just that the fellow start to speaking an English we understand! is that being much too much to ask?”

- R, Accounting

Surprisingly, the Executive Head of CRAP, was quite pleased with the performance and writings of Dr. Sanjay. He had the following to say:

“Well I feel that Sanjay’s ebullient spirit and humble unassuming personality brings a spark of brightness to our otherwise dull day to day life, and I always look forward to engaging in witty banter with him.

Apropos your inquiry into the excessive verbosity of Dr Sanjay: I feel that the issue on hand is that that some of my employees are intimidated by his grammatically and syntactically accurate use of Our Beloved Queen’s Language, and his punctilious attention to detail, to those employees, I say absit invidia - they are clearly aware that I cannot chastise the man for his genius.

I am of the opinion that Dr. Sanjay’s profound mastery of 18th century English and Latin, should not be a reason for less verbally endowed employees to feel intimidated. I do not believe that an actus reus occured here: I feel that this matter can be handled internally, by enrolling our less grammatically capable employees in English classes, and there is no need to involve the media at this critical juncture.

While I thank you for bringing this issue to my attention, I also wish to point out that acerbic and scurrilous rumors like this have no place in our esteemed organization and I am confident that we can arrive at a mutually acceptable resolution to this situation.

On the whole, I am of the opinion that Dr. Sanjay’s excessive verbosity is just a harmless case of cacoethes scribendi.

Speaking of Dr. Sanjay, if you see him, can you ask him about this months newsletter? I have yet to receive my copy..”

On queried about the relevance of using 18th century English for communication in a modern organization, he had the following to say:

Acolytes such as Dr Sanjay and myself, need a way to communicate, which would enable us to stay abreast of each others developments, and it is imperative that our private epistles should be impossible to decipher, if intercepted by an unauthorized third party.

We initially considered cryptography, but this necessitated the purchase of an Enigma machine apiece, a venture which was vetoed by Accounting, due to budgetary constraints.

Instead, we decided to communicate using 18th century English (and Latin) - by using this extinct variant of ancient Shakespearean English, we are confident that, even if someone intercepts our personal messages, it would all just be Greek (or Latin) to them.