Plain Words Page 2
There was no question, two decades on, that the book needed an overhaul, and Fraser had a good go at it, supplying some excellent new jokes (‘I have discussed the question of stocking the proposed poultry plant with my colleagues’). But in his cheery assault on the text, he went considerably beyond the bread-and-butter plainness that he himself advocated. He introduced into the book the phrase ‘the guerdon of popular usage’, spoke of ‘flatulent’ writing, and described Hemingway’s imitators as sounding as though they were ‘grunting’. Where Gowers had written about the attraction between certain pairs of words, Fraser wrote of words that ‘walk out with other charmers’. He coined the needless term ‘pompo-verbosity’, only to contrast it (to no understandable effect) with ‘verbopomp’; and in order to shoehorn ‘verbopomp’ into the text, he took out ‘Micawberite’, a word Gowers had used, not unreasonably, after quoting Mr Micawber.* So it went on. Towards the end of his edition, Fraser threw in a sentence criticising writing that reminded him of ‘an incompetent model flaunting a new dress rather than a sensible woman wearing one’. But he himself was far from a perfect match for his imaginary sensible woman.
The most unfortunate single sentence that Fraser added to the book, one for which there is no evidence Gowers would have felt the slightest sympathy, was this:
Homosexuals are working their way through our vocabulary at an alarming rate: for some time now we have been unable to describe our more eccentric friends as queer, or our more lively ones as gay, without risk of misunderstanding, and we have more recently had to give up calling our more nimble ones light on their feet.
Fraser first makes the vocabulary of English ‘ours’ and not ‘theirs’, then imperiously blames homosexuals for hijacking ‘our’ vocabulary. Even had this claim to ownership of the language been legitimate, the blame was misconceived: the word queer only came to mean ‘homosexual’ because those whom he calls ‘we’ made it a derogatory term, while ‘light on his feet’ was an insult designed to imply that a man was suspiciously good at dancing. For all that, the second edition of The Complete Plain Words was a success, and many readers preferred it to what came next.
The third edition, published in 1986, and edited by the linguist Sidney Greenbaum and the lexicographer Janet Whitcut, showed evidence not of Fraser’s ‘jam’ so much as of the ‘engine-grease’ that he considered equally dangerous. It was Greenbaum and Whitcut’s idea of being judicious, for example, to amend Fraser’s comment above so that it now began: ‘Homosexuals and lesbians are working their way through our vocabulary at an alarming rate …’. It is hard to imagine one editor making this change, let alone a second agreeing to it. It is even harder to imagine lesbians being grateful for the nod.
Greenbaum and Whitcut revised directly from Fraser; they seem never to have considered reinstating material from the original that Fraser had cut. Among other drawbacks, this led to ever greater confusion in the matter of voice. Fraser had said of Gowers’s friendly use of I that it ‘would clearly be wrong to flatten the tone of his book by depersonalising his views’. Fraser therefore simply threw in his own I and lofty we as well, roughly indicating in his preface which parts of the second edition were his alone. But Greenbaum and Whitcut found this too much, and in the third edition did systematically depersonalise the writing. Gowers’s ‘I like to think’ becomes their ‘it would be pleasing to think’, and so on. Elsewhere, they substituted their own we.
It is true that there were two of them, but this change had unhappy results. First, they effectively appropriated Gowers’s role as author—to show their approval, they explained, of what he had said. Second, with their we spread far and wide, they introduced a coercive, patronising tone into the third edition. Gowers himself had sometimes used we, but when he did he almost always meant ‘you the reader and I the person writing this sentence’ (e.g. when he says of certain types of adverbs, ‘we have all seen them used on innumerable occasions’). Greenbaum and Whitcut, by contrast, regularly deployed we as here: ‘We are to prefer, in fact, conclude rather than “reach a conclusion” …’. The advice may be good, but Gowers would never have dreamed of expressing it this way. The tone of we are to prefer is what he called ‘chilly’ (and fought against: see p. 19). The words in fact, as used here, he would have struck out as padding (see pp. 112–18). We are to prefer X rather than Y is unidiomatic (see p. 69) and therefore needlessly risks distracting the reader (see p. 36): Gowers would have written of preferring word X to phrase Y. And rather than, being a longer way of saying to, is a waste of paper (see p. 24). In short, Greenbaum and Whitcut were so far immune to the advice of the book they were editing that they managed to violate four of its precepts in half a sentence.
Their other main change to the book’s written style may have been a better idea, but it was one they also failed to implement convincingly. Though they kept in the advice that said (in their own wording) ‘you may sometimes find it least clumsy to follow the traditional use of he, him and his to include both sexes’, they set about removing this use from the text. No doubt they recognised it as fusty. Yet their campaign was erratic. On some pages they substituted indigestible spates of he or she; on others, they left he to stand, as though the effort of changing it suddenly defeated them. And where they rewrote whole sentences to get round the problem, the results could be leaden. As an example, Gowers had opened with the remark that: ‘Writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another; the writer’s job is to make his reader apprehend his meaning readily and precisely’. Under Greenbaum and Whitcut, this became ‘the writers’ job is to make the readers apprehend the meaning readily and precisely’.
The second and third editions obscured more than Gowers’s authorial voice. When Fraser revised the book in 1973, he also stripped out a great many of the examples Gowers had given of poorly handled English, not because the substitute examples were clearer or more helpful, but because Fraser hoped to do away with the original version’s ‘dated air’. The effect of this, naturally enough—with brand-new references to Edward Heath and the expanded EEC—was to give the work a 1970s air instead, which it kept through the third edition. It is inevitable that in the twenty-first century this improvement has become the literary equivalent of brown varnish.
THE RELEVANCE OF THE ORIGINAL BOOK TODAY
The first step towards restoring The Complete Plain Words has therefore been to do away with all the jam and engine grease. The fourth edition disregards the third and second, and instead directly revises the first. It also reverts to Gowers’s preferred title, Plain Words: he confessed late in life that he thought adding ‘The Complete’ had made it sound ‘ridiculous’. Most of his examples of bungled writing are now back in, in the hope that the 1940s world the reader once again glimpses will no longer seem drab and disheartening, but rather will add to the interest of the book. It is not now perhaps so tiresome to come upon references to withdrawn garments, coupons and requisitioning; to German prisoners marrying local girls; to the Trading with the Enemy Act, or the fear inspired by blister-gas bombs. Mention of the stop-me-and-buy-one man selling ice creams from the back of his tricycle may even have a certain charm. What is more, some of the concerns of the original book face us anew. We too have ‘our present economic difficulties’. We too wrestle with deficits and the problems of youth unemployment. A debate continues over whether mothers should be ‘constrained’ to go out to work. And sadly it still strikes home to read of a ‘growth of mistrust of intellectual activities that have no immediate utilitarian result’. Even strictures on wasting paper are once again a feature of the times, though in 1954 paper shortages were a continuing consequence of the war.
Many of the quotations chosen by Gowers to demonstrate poor handling of English were drawn from documents he had encountered in his work, and so we read in passing of National Insurance, tax instructions, coal, New Town legislation, and whether or not it is suitable to execute women by hanging. But though there are also numerous references to the Second World W
ar, his own record is only glancingly touched on when, in an observation about the Blitz, he strikes a sudden personal note: ‘I used to think during the war when I heard that gas mains had been affected by a raid that it would have been more sensible to say that they had been broken’. Even here, the uninformed reader would have no way of knowing that the author of this stray comment had himself led the organisation responsible for ensuring that those ‘affected’ gas mains were mended again.
In the Penguin Dictionary of Troublesome Words (1984), Bill Bryson draws on The Complete Plain Words for an example of misused commas found in a wartime instruction booklet for airmen training in Canada. The booklet’s author had argued for learning to use clear English by warning that, ‘Pilots, whose minds are dull, do not usually live long’. Bryson caps this with the comment, ‘Removing the commas would convert a sweeping insult into sound advice’. Gowers’s own comment had been, ‘The commas convert a truism into an insult’. The shift from one to the other may seem negligible—Gowers’s deadpan ‘truism’ becomes Bryson’s more anodyne ‘sound advice’. But this strongly marks a difference of historical perspective: Gowers’s barb is that of a man for whom the survival of Allied pilots had very recently been a matter of the greatest importance in the fight to keep German bombers from reaching London.
Nor is Gowers’s sardonic reflection on the value of clear English at a time of catastrophic bombing raids on the capital quite as irrelevant today as one might wish. After terrorist outrages in the city in July 2005, the public transport system came to a halt, people were forced to walk for miles, and the city’s hospitals were overrun. While the Blitz spirit of its citizens was immediately vaunted in the press, the coroner subsequently charged with investigating the bombings found that there had been delays in caring for some of the victims because those working for the different emergency services had been unable to understand one another’s jargon. The coroner’s report contains what Gowers would doubtless also have considered a truism: ‘In a life-threatening situation everyone should be able to understand what everyone else is saying’. It is disturbing to discover that the official response to this comment was the promise that a ‘best practice’ ‘Emergency Responder Interoperability Lexicon’ with ‘additional user-relevant information’, though not ‘mandated’, would nevertheless be ‘cascaded’ through various training courses.
If that seems impenetrable, what of the English used by the broad range of today’s civil servants? Does their language also evince functional non-interoperability, and might they too, therefore, still benefit from a little advice in the spirit of Plain Words?
Apparently so. Representatives of the Local Government Association have grown so exasperated by official jargon that they have taken to publishing an annual list of what they optimistically call ‘banned’ words, ones the LGA would like to see eliminated from all documents put before the public. The list is enormous, and includes informatics, hereditament, beaconicity, centricity, clienting, disbenefits and braindump. As for the question of written style in the Civil Service, not long ago the Daily Mail raged against a government minister who had seen fit to waste time concocting an expensive report for ‘mandarins’ on how to write a straightforward letter. This report, according to the Mail, was filled with ‘excruciatingly pedantic’ warnings against, for instance, the use of meaningless adverbs, and of passive fillers such as it is essential to note that.
Gowers, in this book, agrees with both suggestions. They conform to what would become his most widely quoted maxim: ‘Be short, be simple, be human’. And whatever the Mail thinks, this maxim is still quoted today, even where Gowers himself is forgotten. Harrogate Borough Council, for example, prints it uncredited as a tag at the bottom of every page of its guide to using clear English, a booklet with the uncapitalised title put it plainly.
Merely printing the tag is not enough, of course. To carry out what it proposes requires thought. This is demonstrated by Harrogate Council’s own Corporate Management Team, who declare in what they call an ‘endorsement’ of the guide, ‘Better then to write as if we were speaking to the recipient of our communication’. Though shortish, this sentence is neither simple, with its inflated vocabulary, nor human, with its patronising ‘we’. Had the team absorbed Gowers’s maxim, which they print thirty-one times in their manual, they might instead have said, ‘When you write to someone, use a plain and friendly style’.
In March 1948, in a debate in Parliament on ‘Government English’, Mr Keeling, representing Twickenham, revealed that important official documents had been discovered to be incomprehensible to the general public. He argued that unless something was done about this, the business of various departments would fall into disrepute. He then welcomed the fact that Plain Words was about to be published, and hoped that it would help. Mr Pritt, Hammersmith North, could not resist a cutting response: ‘I have often wondered what the Tory party were interested in. They are not interested in getting anything done. But when we are talking about words their attendance is doubled—there are about seven of them’.
It may surprise the modern reader that Gowers soon found himself criticised for being too liberal in his advice: he discovered for himself, what he would later be told by one of the OUP ‘scrutineers’ who helped him to revise Fowler, that he would have to ‘mediate between the old hatters and the mad hatters’. The old hatters were disgruntled by his willingness in Plain Words to break what they considered ‘the rules’, even as the mad hatters interpreted his advice to write plainly as an example of ‘the snobbishness of the educated’. Meanwhile in odd corners of Whitehall much was made of the impropriety of encouraging junior civil servants to be plain with their superiors.
Though Gowers wrote about ‘rules’, he made it clear that he understood them as conventions. His view in sum was this: ‘Public opinion decides all these questions in the long run. There is little individuals can do about them. Our national vocabulary is a democratic institution, and what is generally accepted will ultimately be correct’. How long a given rule might stand was anybody’s guess. He therefore advised civil servants, who must write comprehensible English for unknown readers, that they should neither ‘perpetuate what is obsolescent’ nor ‘give currency to what is novel’, but should ‘follow what is generally regarded … as the best practice for the time being’.
BRINGING PLAIN WORDS UP TO DATE
That is all very well, but who can say what current ‘best practice’ is? Old hatters and mad hatters continue to broadcast their views. Some believe that Good English, bounded by antique superstitions, is their birthright, to be fought for with the ardour of the Light Brigade at Balaclava. Others dismiss so-called ‘good’ so-called ‘English’ as a risible manifestation of elitism. It is daunting to have to pick a path between these two camps, yet a fresh revision of Plain Words must do just that. Gowers once remarked that if a person were forced to choose, ‘it would be better to be ungrammatical and intelligible than grammatical and unintelligible’, only to add, ‘But we do not have to choose between the two’. Perhaps this new edition of his book is best thought of as being for those who instinctively agree, but who seek guidance on the prevailing conventions—so far as they can be discovered—of clear, formal prose.
When Gowers’s work first came out, he was praised by The Times for his ‘sweetly reasonable’ advice, and by the Daily Telegraph for a prose style that was ‘itself a model of how plain words should be used’. After sixty years, it has of course been necessary here and there to modernise both his advice and his writing, and I have attempted to do so, but lightly. There are instances in the original where Gowers’s style no longer stands. He starts sentences with the word nay, says the trouble about X, and that a railway clerk telephoned to him. He writes of a subject that has not a true antecedent, and of a person’s need to make sure he knows what are his rights of appeal. None of this sounds quite right any more, and so I have made small changes—what the managers of the London Underground call ‘upgrade works’. Habits
of punctuation and spelling have also altered over the decades. Gowers’s to-day, jig-saw, mother-tongue and danger-signal become today, jigsaw, mother tongue and danger signal; acknowledgment and connexion become acknowledgement and connection, etc. His fondness for semicolons, which was striking when he wrote, is even more striking today. Though I am fond of them too, and have left many in place, I have removed about a hundred from the book. There are various misquotations in the original that I have attempted to correct, and I have also very slightly reordered the contents where this makes the line of argument clearer.
News Chronicle, 14 April 1948
Then there is the matter, mentioned earlier, of the use of he, him and his to stand for everyone. In the line referred to above, ‘make sure he knows what are his rights of appeal’, Gowers happened to be invoking the taxpayer; and in 1954 (though of course women also paid taxes) it was standard to use an indeterminate he to do so. There are those who still use this ‘makeshift expedient’, as it is called later in these pages, but there are others who would never think of it, and yet others who reject it on purpose. (Anyone who vaguely assumed of the London coroner mentioned earlier that she was a man, or who wrongly imagined likewise of the government minister excoriated by the Daily Mail that she was a man, must concede that supposedly neutral terms are not necessarily neutral in practice.) In 1965 Gowers admitted that he had spent ‘an awfully long time’ worrying over how to revise what he considered Fowler’s old-fashioned pronouncements in this area. Half a century on, opinions have moved further still. The indeterminate masculine pronoun, which Gowers eventually settled on calling a ‘risk’, is now so widely taken to be in breach of the very friendliness that he so keenly advocated, that I have removed all examples of the use from his writing.