"He accepted the award in good spirit," says Martin Cutts, PLC research director, "but he wasn't quite amused." Cutts, 43, has been the bogeyman for gobbledygook for almost 20 years now, besides being part-time journalist-writer and chairman of Words At Work, which offers writing skill courses for bureaucrats. In 1979, he conceived and co-founded the Plain Language Movement in the UK, which has run a relentless campaign for rewriting lengthy, obtuse, archaic texts, from Acts of Parliament to insurance policies and instruction manuals, in language users can comprehend. To make his point, in 1993, he rewrote in simple English Britain's Timeshare Act, 1992, cutting it down to one-fourth its original size.