Foot in Mouth Award

The Foot in Mouth Award is presented each year by the Plain English Campaign for "a baffling comment by a public figure".^[1] The award was first made in 1993, when it was given to Ted Dexter, the chairman of selectors for the England cricket team. It was awarded again the following year, and, after a two-year break, annually from 1997 to 2022.^[2]

The Plain English Campaign was set up in 1979 when the founder, Chrissie Maher, shredded hundreds of jargon-filled forms and documents in Parliament Square, London.^[3] The group gave their first awards the next year, rewarding organisations that used "plain English" and highlighting those that did not.^[4] Although the Foot in Mouth award was first presented in 1993, the group's 1991 awards gave acknowledgement to a confusing comment by Dan Quayle, then Vice President of the United States.^[2]

The award has been presented 29 times, with only Boris Johnson and Rhodri Morgan receiving it more than once. Johnson won in 2004, 2016, and 2019, while Morgan won in 1998 and 2005. Johnson made a light-hearted response to his second win, claiming that the first award had "made [his] name."^[2] Politicians have been recipients of the award more times than any profession, collecting it on sixteen occasions; athletes, sports managers and sports commentators have won five times. George W. Bush received a "Lifetime Achievement Award" in 2008 for "services to gobbledygook" throughout his presidency.^[2]

The phrase "foot in mouth" is of a family of idioms having to do with eating and being proven incorrect, such as to "eat crow", "eat dirt", to "eat your hat" (or shoe); all probably originating from "to eat one's words", which first appears in print in 1571 in one of John Calvin's tracts, on Psalm 62: "God eateth not his words when he hath once spoken".^[5]