Plain Words Read online

  In the field of neurology Sir Francis Walshe has been provoked to a similar protest. Referring to the fondness of clinicians for inventing new words for newly observed symptoms that may throw light on the mysteries of cerebral physiology, he says:

  Thus one phenomenon may have close on a dozen neologisms attached to it, and these are not always used with precision. All this has made for confusion, for it needs heroic virtues to plunge into the muddy waters of the relevant literature to pluck out truth from their depths.

  Even precise words are of no use where they cannot be understood. A report in the Evening Standard tells how a Dr M. described the condition of a man embroiled in a Southwark court case as ‘bilateral periorbital haematoma and left subconjunctival haemorrhage’. When asked what this meant, he said, ‘Two lovely black eyes’.

  When officials are accused of writing jargon, what is generally meant is that they affect a pompous and flabby verbosity. This is not what I mean. What I have in mind is that technical terms are used—especially conventional phrases invented by a government department—that are understood inside the department but are unintelligible to outsiders. This is true jargon. A circular from the headquarters of a department to its regional officers begins:

  The physical progressing of building cases should be confined to …

  Without the key, nobody could say what meaning this was intended to convey. It is English only in the sense that the words are English words, but they have become a group of symbols used in conventional senses known only to parties to the convention. It may be said that no harm is done, because the instruction is not meant to be read by anyone unfamiliar with the departmental jargon. But using jargon is a dangerous habit. It is easy to forget that members of the public do not understand it, and to slip into the use of it in explaining things to them. If that is done, those seeking enlightenment will find themselves plunged in even deeper obscurity. A member of the department has kindly given me this interpretation of the note quoted above, qualified by the words, ‘as far as I can discover’:

  ‘The physical progressing of building cases’ means going at intervals to the sites of factories, etc., whose building is sponsored by the department and otherwise approved to see how many bricks have been laid since the last visit. ‘Physical’ here apparently exemplifies a portmanteau usage … and refers both to the flesh-and-blood presence of the inspector and to the material development of the edifice, neither of which is, however, mentioned. ‘Progressing’, I gather, should have the accent on the first syllable and should be distinguished from progressing. It means recording or helping forward the progress rather than going forward. ‘Cases’ is the common term for units of work which consist of applying a given set of rules to a number of individual problems … ‘should be confined to’ means that only in the types of cases specified may an officer leave his desk to visit the site.

  Let us take another example. ‘Distribution of industry policy’ is an expression well understood in the Board of Trade and other departments concerned with the subject. But it is jargon. Intrinsically the phrase has no certain meaning. Not even its grammatical construction is clear. So far as the words go, it is at least as likely that it refers to distributing something called ‘industry-policy’ as to a policy of distributing industry. Even when we know that ‘distribution-of-industry’ is a compound noun-adjective qualifying policy, we still do not give the words the full meaning that those who invented the phrase intended it to have. The esoteric meaning attached to it is ‘the policy of exercising governmental control over the establishment of new factories in such a way as to minimise the risk of local mass unemployment’. No doubt it is convenient to have a label for anything that can only be explained so cumbrously. But it must not be forgotten that what is written on the label consists of code symbols unintelligible to the outsider. Forgetfulness of this kind causes perplexity and irritation. A judge recently said that he could form no idea of what was meant by the sentence: ‘These prices are basis prices per ton for the representative-basis-pricing specification and size and quantity’; and the Manchester Guardian was once moved to describe the sense of despair produced by a document from the Ministry of Supply, quoted below, purporting to explain a (genuine) simplification in planning:

  The sub-authorisations required by its sub-contractors to re-authorise their orders as in (I) and (II) above. It should be borne in mind that sub-contractors may need re-authorisation not only of sub-authorisations already given for period II and beyond, but also for sub-authorisations of earlier periods, so as to revalidate orders or parts of orders as in (I).

  Single words are sometimes given a special meaning for official purposes. This was especially true of words much used during the war. At a time when our lives were regulated at every turn by the distinction between what was and what was not ‘essential’, that word sprouted curiously. Its development can be traced through these three quotations:

  I can only deal with applications of a highly essential nature.

  It is impossible to approve importations from the USA unless there is a compelling case of essentiality.

  It is confirmed that as a farmer you are granted high essentiality.

  In the last at any rate, the word has become jargon, given a meaning not known to the dictionaries. What the writer meant in the last one was, ‘you are high on our waiting list’.

  In its ordinary sense also, essential is frequently used unsuitably. Government departments have to issue so many instructions to all and sundry nowadays that those who draft them get tired of saying that people should or must do things, and misguidedly seek to introduce the relief of variety by saying, for instance, that it is necessary or that it is important that things should be done. And from that it is only a step to work oneself up into saying that it is ‘essential’ or ‘vital’ or even ‘of paramount importance’. Here is an extract from a wartime departmental circular:

  In view of the national situation on the supply of textiles and buttons it is of paramount importance that these withdrawn garments shall be put to useful purposes …

  To say that a thing is of paramount importance can only mean that it transcends in importance all other subjects. I cannot believe that anything to do with buttons can ever have been in that class.

  Legal diction, as I have said, is necessarily a class apart, and an explanation of the provisions of a legal document must therefore be translated into familiar words simply arranged:

  With reference to your letter of the 12th August, I have to state in answer to question 1 thereof that where particulars of a partnership are disclosed to the Executive Council the remuneration of the individual partner for superannuation purposes will be deemed to be such proportion of the total remuneration of such practitioners as the proportion of his share in the partnership profits bears to the total proportion of the shares of such practitioner in those profits.

  This is a good example of how not to explain. I think it means merely, ‘Your income will be taken to be the same proportion of the firm’s remuneration as you used to get of its profits’. I may be wrong, but even so I cannot believe that language is unequal to any clearer explanation than the one that the unfortunate correspondent received.

  Here is another example of the failure to shake off the shackles of legal language:

  Separate departments in the same premises are treated as separate premises for this purpose where separate branches of work which are commonly carried on as separate businesses in separate premises are carried on in separate departments in the same premises.

  This sentence is constructed with just that mathematical arrangement of words that lawyers adopt to make their meaning unambiguous. Worked out as one would work out an equation, the sentence serves its purpose. As literature, it is balderdash. The explanation could easily have been given in some such way as this:

  If branches of work commonly carried on as separate businesses are carried on in separate departments of the same premises, those departments will be tr
eated as separate premises.

  This shows how easily an unruly sentence like this can be reduced to order by turning part of it into an if clause.

  Even without the corrupting influence of jargon or legal diction, a careless explanation may leave the thing explained even more obscure than it was before. The New Yorker, in August 1948, quoted from a publication called Systems Magazine:

  Let us paraphrase it and define Work Simplification as ‘that method of accomplishing a necessary purpose omitting nothing necessary to that purpose in the simplest fashion is best.’ This definition is important for it takes the mystery out of Work Simplification and leaves the essentials clearly outlined and succinctly stated.

  The New Yorker’s comment was: ‘It does indeed’.

  Note. There are several warnings in this book against the use of chilly formalities. Happily, the most extreme examples that Gowers cited in 1954 have since become risible (This document is forwarded herewith for the favour of your utilisation … The Minister cannot conceal from himself that X … AB per pro CD … The per stipes beneficiaries Y, etc.). No civil servant today could pepper a document with writing of this kind unaware of the remarkable effect it must have on its reader.

  But the decline of such phrases is balanced by other changes for the worse. Gowers felt in the 1950s that official writing (by contrast with commercial and academic prose) played ‘a comparatively small part’ in promulgating jargon. If that was really true then, it is not true now. A report recently put forward for public notice on the ‘Peri-operative Care of the Higher Risk Surgical Patient’ contains an obscure sentence that is representative of innumerable other obscure sentences in today’s official documents:

  The adoption of an escalation strategy which incorporates defined time points and the early involvement of senior staff when necessary are strongly advised.

  What is the ordinary person to make of this? It means something along the lines of, ‘We strongly advise this: that hospital staff should follow a set timetable of checks, and when any results are worrying, should swiftly seek help from a doctor qualified to deal with the problem’. In a later version, the word ‘are’ in the original has helpfully been changed to ‘is’; but the jargon remains, so that to a member of the public, the sentence must remain largely meaningless.

  Another example of modern jargon is provided by the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills in a document investigating the merits of ‘skills conditionality’. Because this phrase has no conventional meaning, the authors go to the trouble of providing a gloss: it means, they explain, ‘mandating claimants with skills needs to training’ (also referred to as ‘work activity’), with ‘potential benefit sanctions for non-participation’, though not where this would interfere with ‘automatic passporting’ to housing benefits. In more understandable English this means ‘insisting that those who are jobless and who are deemed to need training should submit to being trained, under threat of having their welfare payments docked if they refuse, though without threat to their housing benefits’. Many ordinary speakers were gravely unimpressed by what ‘skills conditionality’ turned out to mean in practice, with public protests by those who interpreted training or ‘work activity’ as work, who found the phrase ‘benefit sanction’ incongruous, and who accused the Government of supplying forced labour to private business.

  Jargon may lead to obscurity, but the patterns of ordinary speech can be equally defeating. A leaflet issued by Oxfordshire County Council to explain its parking scheme to residents states idly that ‘Permits may be renewed fourteen days before expiry on production of all documents the same as a new application’. The concerned resident is forced to struggle after the meaning here, which in the end appears to be this: ‘You may renew your permit fourteen days before it runs out (and thereafter, presumably). To do so you will need the same supporting documents that we ask for with a new application’.

  Despite the evidence of this parking notice, and of a wider trend towards informality in many public documents, jargon and elevated language remain greater threats to clarity than the overdoing of what Gowers called ‘simple diction’. Stock phrases such as herewith for the favour of your notice may have gone, but an excess of dignity can often come down to a single word. The Guardian’s online garden centre, for example, advertises ‘bulbs, bedding, perennials, annuals, shrubs and trees’, then adds:

  With every order you’ll receive comprehensive cultural instructions and we promise that if you aren’t delighted with your order we’ll replace your order or give you your money back.

  What, the humble gardener wonders bleakly, are these ‘comprehensive cultural instructions’, and why would a passing interest in crocuses make it seem as though one needed them? Growing would do perfectly well the job that ‘comprehensive cultural’ is supposed to do, where the use of cultural for growing will bring most readers to a momentary halt.

  Gowers ended this chapter with a column of seductive or ‘showy’ words that he thought were overworked in official documents. Though he accepted that they all had their proper uses, he warned against the temptation to use them in preference to other words that ‘would convey better the meaning you want to express’. His advice to avoid using moiety for half is probably now obsolete, but the rest of his list still stands. Of the hundred or so words given below, roughly fifty are modern examples that have come into vogue since. (It should be added that one or two of these more recent examples barely qualify as having ‘proper’ uses.) The right-hand column, meanwhile, gives other words, not necessarily synonyms, that might perhaps be used instead, ‘if only, in some cases,’ as Gowers put it, ‘as useful change-bowlers’. ~

  Seductive words: Words you might use instead:

  Access (verb) Reach; get hold of; find

  Achieve Do

  Acquaint Tell; inform

  Adumbrate Sketch; outline; foreshadow

  Advert Refer

  Advise Tell

  Ameliorate Improve; better

  Apprise Inform; tell

  Assist Help

  Baseline Starting point

  Cease Stop; end; finish

  Commence Begin; start

  Commission Buy

  Consensual Agreed

  Consider Think

  Consortium Group

  Constellation Group; array, arrangement

  Deem Think

  Deliver Give; provide; do

  Desire Wish; hope

  Desist Stop

  Discontinue Stop

  Donate Give

  Dynamic Strong; forceful

  Enable Help

  Engage Work with; interest

  Enhance Improve

  Envisage Think; expect; face

  Establish Show; find out; set up; prove

  Eventuate Come about; turn out; happen; result; occur

  Evince Show; display; manifest

  Extrapolate Work out from

  Facilitate Help

  Factor Fact; cause; consideration; feature; circumstance; element

  Finalise Finish; complete

  Function (verb) Work; operate; act

  Iconic Respected; good; loved

  Impact (verb) Affect

  Implement Carry out; do; fulfil

  In isolation By itself

  Indicate Show

  Inform Tell

  Initiate Begin; start

  Initiative Idea; plan

  Inspirational Inspiring; uplifting

  Integrate Join; mix; combine

  Let go Sack

  Leverage (noun) Influence

  Leverage (verb) Use; manipulate

  Limited Small; few

  Locality Place

  Locate Find

  Major Main; chief; principal; important

  Materialise Happen; take place; come about; occur

  Meaningful Useful; helpful; valuable

  Mechanism Method

  Minimise Underestimate; disparage; belittle; make light of

&n
bsp; Mission Aim; purpose

  Modalities Kinds; sorts; types; forms; modes

  Modify Change; alter

  Motivational Inspiring

  Notify Tell

  Optimistic Hopeful

  Optimum Best

  Outcome Result

  Participate Take part in; join in with

  Perform Do

  Persons Anyone; people

  Practically Almost; nearly; all but

  Prior to Before

  Proceed Go; carry on

  Procure Buy; get hold of

  Provide Give; do

  Purchase Buy

  Purport (noun) Upshot; gist; tenor; substance

  Question (noun) Matter; problem; subject; topic

  Rationalise Cut; sack

  Render Make

  Require Want; need

  Reside Live

  Residence Home

  Restructuring Job losses

  Rightsizing Job losses

  Shake up Job losses

  Spectrum Range

  State Say

  Streamlining Job losses

  Submit Give; send

  Suboptimal Unsatisfactory; inadequate

  Sufficient Enough

  Symposium Meeting

  Terminate End

  Transmit Send; forward

  Undertake Agree; do

  Unilateral One-sided

  Utilise Use

  Virtually Almost; nearly; all but

  Vision Plan; aim; hope

  Visualise Imagine; picture

  VIII

  The Choice of Words (4)

  Choosing the precise word

  And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped? For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken?