I treasure clear and concise writing but I also can’t help but admire its opposite.

It’s a grudging admiration, to be sure.

Not something to which I aspire, or would encourage in any writer.

But propaganda requires a commitment to obfuscation that, misguided though it is, sometimes impresses me with its sheer audacity.

The federal government has few peers in this arena.

Advertising is of course a form of propaganda, but unlike communications from the feds, its persuasive purpose is undisguised.

And occasionally entertaining.

Publications produced on the public dime are another matter altogether.

The immensity of the federal government, and the verbosity of its hundreds of individual agencies, guarantees a gargantuan volume of examples of doublespeak, a term inspired by George Orwell’s novel “1984” (although not actually appearing in it).

I regularly read government publications as part of my job. I am accustomed to the tangled syntax and clumsy constructions typical of the genre.

But occasionally I come across examples that distinguish themselves as true achievements in this grim art.

A recent purveyor is the U.S. Postal Service.

In researching a story about the agency’s new policy that reduces how often outgoing mail is picked up at many rural post offices, including some in Baker County, I marveled at how the Postal Service depicts this change.

As often is the case, the policy’s name distills the basic concept of misdirection.

“Local Transportation Optimization.”

This tells the reader nothing, of course, about the policy itself.

We can deduce that it has something to do with local transportation, and thus possibly with hauling mail.

But “optimization” is an example of a noxious linguistic tactic that has contributed greatly to making government publications the written equivalent of an octopus squirting ink into the water to conceal its escape.

(Private companies are enthusiastic adopters of the technique, as well.)

The idea is to lard the language with nouns converted from verbs or adjectives.

The verb “optimize” bears a distinct whiff of jargon, to be sure, a murky cousin to “implement.”

But at least its meaning is relatively clear.

A reasonable person would presume that this Postal Service policy is intended to improve — indeed, to optimize, or make the best of — something involving local transportation.

The reality is quite different.

The policy optimizes local transportation by doing less of it.

The Postal Service has trimmed its mail collection schedule for some post offices. The truck that used to pick up outgoing mail in the evening no longer does. The outgoing mail sits in the post office until the next morning.

Since the Postal Service is not capable of tweaking the space-time continuum, the inevitable result is that some mail will be delivered later than it used to be.

The agency makes a mighty effort, though, to avoid admitting this.

Besides describing this as “optimization,” the Postal Service contends in a public statement that despite the new policy, “customer service will not be impacted with this change and remains aligned to meet product service standards.”

The first part of that claim seems to me indefensible.

The second part is meaningless deflection.

Since the Postal Service doesn’t define “product service standards,” how is a customer to know whether the agency is still “aligned” with those standards?

Moreover, why would anyone care?

An internal agency document that outlines the new policy expands on this strategy.

It contains such platitudes as “Providing world-class service to our customers while exercising fiscal responsibility is a key objective of our 10-year Delivering for America strategic plan. Now in the third year of the plan, the Postal Service is continuously transforming and strengthening our business model.”

The terms sound promising, of course.

“World-class.”

“Strengthening.”

Yet they are deployed in a document that says — without actually saying so, of course — that in some places mail will be collected later than it used to be.

The document describes that change this way: “Part of the transformation involves improving our transportation network efficiency — including a change. … to optimize our process for outbound mail.”

I daresay that no customer affected would agree this constitutes an improvement, or that it optimizes anything other than, I suppose, the Postal Service’s truck route schedule.

But that’s reality.

And reality — which is to say, truth — is about as welcome in the world of propaganda as a mink farm owner is at a PETA convention.