GovernmentExecutive.com

Here's an excerpt from a piece in the Sunday Denver Post by Fred Brown, the paper's retired capitol bureau chief:

A reader recently forwarded what amounts to a gibberish generator. It's a list of 30 words, numbered 0 to 9 in each of three columns. The trick is to think of a three-digit number, then match those numbers with a word from each column. The result is a three-word phrase of stunningly bureaucratic buzzwords. For example, today's date, 323, yields "parallel, monitored mobility."

This highly amusing device is known as the Systematic Buzz Phrase Generator. I'd never heard of it, but apparently it's been around since 1968. And is it any surprise at all that the person who created it, a guy by the name of Philip Broughton, was a federal employee at the Public Health Service?

Here, by the way, are some other phrases the generator randomly turns out: "integrated reciprocal flexibility" (031) and "functional transitional contingency" (469). It strikes me that those are every bit as meaningful today as they would have been 40 years ago.