ABSTRACT
The Language of Safety The Concepts of Language All language has the same goal – to communicate someone's thoughts. When those thoughts are about matters of life and death (as in safety work), it is vital that the writer and reader have the same understanding of the original thoughts. Modern English language has a great ability to express many things in many different ways. It sometimes seems that there is a word for everything we could possibly want to express. Unfortunately this is not the case. We do have words for the graded separations of ‘high’, ‘medium’ and ‘low’, but we only have ‘safe’ and ‘unsafe’. There is no single word for the level of safety that is at an acceptable level between safe and unsafe. Perhaps, there isn’t one, that is, the concept of safety is a binary condition, you either are or are not – there is no in between. This debate is on going, and I do not intend to settle it myself. This text will consider that there is a mid-region between safe and unsafe, even if the region is just thought of as a ‘line’, rather than a continental sized area. Within English as a language there is a problem. It’s a process called ellipsis and it allows you to leave out words you think are obvious, and it is perfectly acceptable grammar. For example, if I tell you that I am presenting some equipment safety evidence in a report, and you ask “What has been demonstrated?”, you actually mean ‘What has been demonstrated about the equipment by the safety evidence ?’ You just left out the second half of the sentence. This is perfectly fine because you and I are both fully aware of the context of our statements. But I have seen examples in real safety documents where after a while, I’m not sure about what was trying to be said. This is because of unconscious use of the ellipsis process. Here is a paragraph of text from a real safety requirement document introducing the report section on the tracking of software failures;
Visible bug tracking Here we provide evidence of bug tracking for the software. ‘XXXXX’ is the database that is used to track all issues regarding this system. It has full visibility and is extremely detailed.
