Bureauarcracy

Bureaucracy. There, I had to look it up again. Every single time, without fail. It's like some kind of linguistic booby trap, designed to make you feel like an idiot. The moment you need to type it, your fingers hover over the keyboard in uncertainty. Is it bureacracy? Bureaucracy? Bureauarcracy? By the time you've settled on a version, you're already being patronised by the red squiggly line, that smug little digital pedant.

And what a word to be difficult. Bureaucracy, that great administrative labyrinth where common sense goes to die. A system that exists purely to sustain itself, expanding like some Kafkaesque blob, consuming productivity and replacing it with forms. And not just any forms – forms that require you to fill in the same information you've already given six times, in different boxes, on pages designed by someone who must have been paid by the syllable.

You’d think an entity so obsessed with precision and procedure would have the decency to give itself a name that people can spell. But no. It had to be something French, didn't it? Layers of vowels packed together like commuters in rush hour. And then, for extra spite, a silent ‘eau’ shoved in the middle. Because nothing screams efficiency like a word that looks like a Scrabble accident.

It’s not just me, either. Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl, once noted that over half of the authors she interviewed – many of them successful, bestselling writers – admitted they couldn't spell "bureaucracy" without assistance. If even professional wordsmiths are stumped, what hope is there for the rest of us?

Of course, bureaucracy isn't just hard to spell – it’s impossible to escape. Try calling any government office and you’ll be greeted by an automated message informing you that they’re experiencing “an unusually high volume of calls.” Unusual? Really? Every single day? If it’s that predictable, it’s not unusual, is it? That’s just the volume. And once you get through to a human, they’ll inform you that you’ve filled in the wrong form, in the wrong colour ink, and it needs to be resubmitted in triplicate to an address that only accepts correspondence by post. Which will then be lost.

And don’t think digital bureaucracy is any better. Try navigating the government’s website for anything important. Click a link and you’re taken to a page telling you that, actually, what you need is on another page, which then links you back to where you started. Eventually, out of sheer despair, you give up and write a strongly worded email – which will receive an auto-reply informing you that responses can take up to six weeks.

It’s no wonder the word is impossible to spell. It reflects the very nature of the beast – unnecessarily complex, infuriatingly convoluted, and ultimately designed to make you question your own sanity. And the worst part? We all just accept it. Because there is no alternative. Bureaucracy exists because bureaucracy exists. And no one, anywhere, has ever successfully fought it. The best you can hope for is survival.

So here I am, at the age of seventy, still having to check the spelling of bureaucracy every time I write it. Perhaps that’s the ultimate bureaucratic trick – ensuring you’ll always be under its control, even in something as simple as spelling its wretched name.