Feds give winter weather tips without the hot air

On the first day of winter, Vice President Al Gore honored two federal employees who rewrote government safety alerts on staying safe and warm during the holiday season.

The alerts, re-written in plain English by Federal Emergency Management Agency employees Don Jacks and Barbara Patasce, earned the two employees Gore's sixth plain language award on Monday.

The safety alerts used to start with the following introduction:

"Winter preparedness tips. Timely preparation, including structural and non-structural mitigation measures to avoid the impacts of severe winter weather, can avert heavy personal, business, and government expenditures. Experts agree that the following measures can be effective in dealing with the challenges of severe winter weather."

FEMA's new version begins:

"Severe winter weather can be extremely dangerous. Consider these safety tips to protect your property and yourself."

"If we took the same approach to Christmas songs that we take to the language of federal rules and regulations, instead of 'Silent Night,' we'd be singing about 'noise-mitigated post-daylight time intervals,'" Gore quipped at the awards ceremony. "Instead of 'Jingle Bells,' we'd be humming about 'non-noise-mitigated metallurgical percussion instruments.' And instead of 'Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,' we might have 'Rudolph, the Rouge-Hued, Ventrally Illuminated Ungulate.'"

The plain language awards, which Gore issues monthly, follow upon a June 1 presidential memorandum instructing agencies to put communications into everyday language that people can understand clearly.

"This is a regular occurrence because reinventing government requires constant attention," Gore said at a ceremony Monday. "We hit it every single day, every week, every month, and one of the new initiatives is this plain language award, and I'm very pleased to be able to present it again this month."