Plain English Campaign: Annual Awards
Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.
US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld at press briefing in 2003. This quote was selected as the 2003 “Foot in Mouth” award winner.
This kind of obfuscated gibberish is more common than we realize. At the startup I worked at 2000, the VP of engineering referred to “unk unks” or unknown unknowns. That was my first exposure to that, but I’m guessing it’s not uncommon in the defense/aerospace establishment (that fellow was a Boeing alumnus).