Simplicity Is Not Their Department

No one loves the county of Ventura more than I do, but I just got a call from the deputy manager for cross connection control at the Ventura County Environmental Health Division, East County. Or did she say flood water control, Behavioral Health Division?

Which is exactly what is wrong with government today: too many syllables. Way, way too many. Remember when a government center was a courthouse? That’s three extra syllables right there.

Like I said, I love government in the worst way and harbor no prejudice against any level of it, be it city, county, state, federal or World Wildlife Federation. Some of my best friends are civil servants.

I’m married to a man who once got a job with the county’s Probation Department. Years later he retired from the newly named Correction Services Agency (which always sounded to me like an office supply store where you buy Wite-Out). Recently, we went to a banquet at the newly renamed Probation Agency. It’s enough to make me want to violate probation.

Why do my favorite government agencies do this? Just think of the letterhead changes.

Many years ago I was a typist clerk in the county’s Personnel Department. Today, I would be a typist clerk in the Human Resources Department. (Two more syllables.)

Now, Personnel Department was a perfectly good name. It’s the first place I’d think to apply for a job there.

But Human Resources? I thought a human resource was something like the opposable thumb, the fight-or-flight response or that special something our ancestors used to figure out that a flint spark can start a fire. Now, that’s what I call using your human resources. Something Margaret Mead would study.

I could go on. Take the town I live in: Ventura. Excuse me, I mean San Buenaventura. It’s the town so nice they named it twice. (Three extra syllables.)

I called the Post Office, I mean Postal Service, to find out the name of the town I live in.

“We accept mail for either,” the federal employee told me.

Now, I agree, San Buenaventura sounds more ritzy. But when my husband paid our bills last week, he griped as usual about writer’s cramp from making checks out to “City of San Buenaventura.”

To be fair, as a member of the media, I once wrote a weather story about a “rain event” instead of “rain.” That’s two extra syllables for no good reason right there.

And I have to admit that the government can still be straightforward where it counts. The tax collector is still the tax collector. None of this “Fee-for-Benefit Agency” folderol.

Such forthrightness makes me downright nostalgic for agencies I never felt sentimental about, like the Welfare Department--now the Public Social Services Agency (five more syllables).

The Mental Health Department is now the Behavioral Health Department (two more syllables). The hospital is now the medical center, but the Unemployment Office has become much more upbeat: the Employment Development Department.

One of the abiding governmental mysteries for me will always be: When is a department an “agency” or an “office” or a “district” or a “services” or a “division?”

Maybe I’ll call the Department of Naming and find out.