Plain Words Page 6

  These starchy words may not be bad English in their proper places, but you should avoid them for two reasons. First, some of the more unusual of them may actually be outside your reader’s vocabulary, and will convey no meaning at all. Second, their use runs counter to your duty to show that officials are human. These words give the reader the impression that officials are not made of common clay but are, in their own estimation at least, beings superior and aloof. They create the wrong atmosphere. The frost once formed by a phrase or two of this sort is not easily melted. If you turn back to the example given under rule (8) you will see how careful the writer of the revised version has been about this. The word individual (a technical term of income tax law to distinguish between a personal taxpayer and a corporate one) was unnecessary and has disappeared. Deduction of tax is translated into allowance, incapacitated into unable to work, is resident with into lives with, and by reason of old age or infirmity into because you are old or infirm.

  Here is an example of words chosen for their simplicity:

  If a worker’s clothing is destroyed beyond all hope of repair by an accident on his job his employer can apply to us for the coupons needed to replace it. This does not mean of course that anyone can get coupons if his boots fall to pieces through ordinary wear or if he just gets a tear in his trousers.

  ‘If he just gets a tear in his trousers’ not only conveys a clearer meaning than (say) ‘If his garments suffer comparatively minor damage and are capable of effective reconditioning’, it also creates a different atmosphere. The reader feels that these words were written by a human being and not a mere cog in the bureaucratic machine—almost that the writer might be rather a decent sort.

  I have called this chapter ‘The Elements’ because in it I have suggested certain elementary rules—‘be short, be simple, be human’—for officials to follow in the duties that I have described as ‘explaining the law to the millions’. These rules apply no less to official writing of other kinds, and they will be elaborated in Chapters V to VIII, in which much of what has been said in this chapter will be expanded. I can claim no novelty for my advice. Similar precepts were laid down for the Egyptian Civil Service some thousands of years ago:

  Be courteous and tactful as well as honest and diligent.

  All your doings are publicly known, and must therefore

  Be beyond complaint or criticism. Be absolutely impartial.

  Always give a reason for refusing a plea; complainants

  Like a kindly hearing even more than a successful plea.

  Preserve dignity but avoid inspiring fear.

  Be an artist in words, that you may be strong, for

  The tongue is a sword …

  If we may judge from the following letter, those brought up in this tradition succeeded in avoiding verbiage. It is from a Minister of Finance to a senior civil servant:

  Apollonius to Zeno, greeting. You did right to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell.

  IV

  Correctness

  My Lord, I do here, in the Name of all the Learned and Polite Persons of the Nation, complain to Your Lordship, as First Minister, that our Language is extremely imperfect; that its daily Improvements are by no means in proportion to its daily Corruptions; that the Pretenders to polish and refine it, have chiefly multiplied Abuses and Absurdities; and, that in many Instances, it offends against every Part of Grammar.

  SWIFT, Proposal for Correcting, Improving and

  Ascertaining the English Tongue, 1712

  We will now turn to the implications of a remark I made in Chapter I: ‘Lapses from what for the time being is regarded as correct irritate readers educated to notice errors, distract their attention, and so make them less likely to be affected precisely as you wish’. This suggests a fourth rule to add to the three with which we finished the last chapter—‘be correct’. It applies to both vocabulary and grammar. This chapter is concerned with vocabulary only, and grammar will be the subject of Chapter IX.

  Correctness of vocabulary seems once to have been enforced more sternly on officials than it is now. More than two centuries ago the Secretary to the Commissioners of Excise wrote this letter to the Supervisor of Pontefract:

  The Commissioners on their perusal of your 2nd Round Diary observe that you make use of many affected phrases and incongruous words as ‘phantation’, ‘preconception’, ‘harmony’, ‘scotomy’, ‘illegal procedure’, … all which you use in a sense which the words do not naturally bear. I am ordered to acquaint you that if you hereafter continue that affected and schoolboy way of writing and to murder the language in such a manner you will be discharged for a fool. (Quoted in Edward Hughes, Studies in Administration and Finance, 1558–1825, 1934)

  To us the punishment seems disproportionate to the offence, though the same penalty today might prove gratifying to those who think we have too many officials. That said, we can have nothing but admiration for the sentiment of the letter and for the vigorous directness of its phrasing. It serves moreover to illustrate a difficulty presented by this chapter’s precept. What is correctness, and who is to be the judge of it? It cannot be the same now as it was then. A collector of customs and excise today might certainly use the expression illegal procedure without being called into question, and might even refer safely to ‘harmony of relations with trade’. On the other hand it would not do now to say, as the Supervisor of Pontefract might have said, that the local bench was ‘an indifferent body’, meaning that they performed their duties with impartiality, or that a certain businessman prevented the arrival of his staff at his office, meaning that he always got there first.

  English is not static—neither in vocabulary, nor in grammar, nor yet in that elusive quality called style. The fashion in prose alternates between the ornate and the plain, the elevated and the colloquial. Grammar and punctuation have defied all efforts over the years to force them into the mould of a permanent code of rules. Old words drop out or change their meanings; new words are admitted. What was stigmatised by the purists of one generation as a corruption of the language may a few generations later be accepted as an enrichment, and what was then common currency may have become a pompous archaism or acquired new significance.

  Eminent figures with a care for the language, such as Swift, have from time to time proposed that an Authority should be set up to preserve what is good and resist what is bad. ‘They will find’, he said, in his Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, ‘many Words that deserve to be utterly thrown out of our language, many more to be corrected; and perhaps not a few, long since antiquated, which ought to be restored, on account of their Energy and Sound.’ Swift’s plea, made in the form of a letter to the Lord Treasurer, came to nothing, causing Lord Chesterfield, Swift’s contemporary, to observe dryly in an essay of 1754 that this was less than surprising, ‘precision and perspicuity not being in general the favourite objects of Ministers’. A year later, in the Preface to his Dictionary, Dr Johnson described the task as hopeless:

  Academies have been instituted, to guard the avenues of their languages, to retain fugitives, and repulse invaders; but their vigilance and activity have hitherto been in vain; sounds are too volatile and subtile for legal restraints; to enchain syllables, and to lash the wind, are equally the undertakings of pride, unwilling to measure its desires by its strength.

  More recently we have seen a Society for Pure English, with eminent leaders, inviting the support of those who ‘would aim at preserving all the richness of differentiation in our vocabulary, its nice grammatical usages, its traditional idioms, and the music of its inherited pronunciation’, but would oppose ‘whatever is slipshod and careless, and all blurring of hard-won distinctions’, while opposing no less ‘the tyranny of schoolmasters and grammarians, both in their pedantic conservatism, and in their ignorant enforcing of new-fangled rules’. But it is now defunct.

  Dr Johnson was right, as usual. One has only to look at the words proposed by Swift for inclusion
in his Index Expurgatorius to realise how difficult, delicate and disappointing it is to resist new words and new meanings. He condemns, for instance, sham, banter, mob, bully and bamboozle. A generation later Dr Johnson called clever a ‘low word’ and fun and stingy ‘low cant’. Should we not have been poorer if Swift and Johnson had had their way in this? There is no saying how things will go. The fight for admission to the language is quickly won by some assailants, but long resistance is maintained against others. The word that excited Swift to greatest fury was mob, a contraction of mobile vulgus. Its victory was rapid and complete. So was that of banter and bamboozle, which he found hardly less offensive. And if rep for reputation has never quite risen above being slang, and phiz for physiognomy is now dead, that is not because Swift denounced them, but because public opinion did not fully embrace them.

  Some words gatecrash irresistibly because their sound is so appropriate to the meaning they are trying to acquire. Gatecrash is itself an example. It comes from America and has only been in the language since the 1930s. We still have defenders of our tongue who scrutinise such words, condemning them as undesirables. But we ought not to forget how greatly our language has been enriched by the ebullient word-making habit of the Americans. Acquisitions of the past few decades include debunk, commuter, cold war, nifty, babysitter, stockpile, bulldoze, teenager, traffic jam, underdog and many others. I do not see why people should turn up their noses at words that usefully fill a gap. These things are a matter of taste, but one’s own taste is of no importance unless it happens to reflect the general.

  Reliable was long opposed on the curious ground that it was an impossible construction; an adjective formed from rely could only be reli-on-able. I remember noticing as a junior in the India Office many years ago that the Secretary of State struck it out of a draft despatch and wrote in trustworthy, but that must have been almost the last shot fired at it. The objection to it was a survival of a curious theory, widely held in pre-Fowler days, that no sentence could be ‘good grammar’, and no word a respectable word, if its construction violated logic or reason. But it is not the habit of the English to refrain from doing anything merely because it is illogical, and in any case it was less illogical to accept reliable than to strain at it after swallowing available and objectionable. (I shall have more to say about pedantry when we consider grammar in Chapter IX.)

  Nice in the sense in which it is ordinarily used in conversation today has still not yet fully established itself in literary English, though we know from the rather priggish lecture that Henry Tilney gives about it to Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey that it was trying to get over the barrier as far back as the start of the nineteenth century:

  ‘Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! it does for every thing. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement;—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.’

  ‘While, in fact,’ cried his sister, ‘it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise.’

  Equally, haver does not mean ‘vacillate’ (it means ‘blather’), but almost everyone south of the Border thinks it does: there is no withstanding its suggestion of simultaneous hovering and wavering. The dictionaries do not yet recognise this, but doubtless they will soon bow to the inevitable.*

  There has been further stout resistance to certain words that attacked the barrier in the nineteenth century with powerful encouragement from Dickens—mutual, individual and aggravate. Mutual, not in the sense of ‘reciprocated’ but of ‘common’ or ‘pertaining to both parties’, as in Our Mutual Friend, goes back to the sixteenth century, according to the OED, yet some people still regard this as incorrect. Perhaps the reason it is so difficult to restrain the word to its ‘correct’ meaning is the ambiguity of common. (‘Our common friend’ might be taken as a reflection on the friend’s manners or birth.)* The use of individual that is unquestionably correct is to distinguish a single person from a collective body, as it is used in the Income Tax Acts to distinguish between a personal taxpayer and a corporate one. But its use as a facetious term of disparagement was once common and still lingers. That was how Mr Jorrocks, Surtees’s hero, understood it when Mr Martin Moonface described him as an ‘unfortunate individual’, provoking the retort ‘You are another indiwidual’. Over aggravate the long-drawn-out struggle still continues between those who, like Dickens, use it in the sense of ‘annoy’ and those who would confine it to its original sense of ‘make worse’.† About all these words, in the minds of purists, the issue is still in the balance. About all these words, in the minds of purists, the issue is still in the balance.

  It is around new verbs that battles rage most hotly. New verbs are ordinarily formed in one of three ways, all of which have been employed in the past to create useful additions to our vocabulary. The first is the simple method of treating a noun as a verb. It is one of the beauties of our language that nouns can be converted so readily into verbs and adjectives. Elbow, for instance, was a 600-year-old noun when Shakespeare made it into a verb in King Lear. The second is what is called ‘back-formation’, that is to say, forming from a noun the sort of verb from which the noun might have been formed had the verb come first. In this way the verb diagnose was formed from diagnosis. The third is to add ise* to an adjective, as sterilise has been formed from sterile. All these methods are being used today with no little zest. New verbs for something that is itself new (like pressurise) cannot be gainsaid. Service is a natural and useful newcomer in an age when almost everyone keeps a machine of some sort that needs periodical attention. But it provides an interesting example of the way in which new verbs, once you give them an inch, may take a yard. Service is already ousting serve, as in

  A large number of depots of one sort or another will be required to service the town.

  To enable the Local Authority to take advantage of this provision it is essential that sites should be available, ready serviced with roads and sewers.

  As I write, the credentials of to contact are still in dispute between those like Sir Alan Herbert, who in his book of 1935, What a Word!, calls it ‘loathsome’, and those like Ivor Brown, who, in A Word in your Ear of 1942, holds that it can claim indulgence on the ground that besides this ‘there is no word which covers approach by telephone, letter and speech’, and contact is ‘self-explanatory and concise’. If I were to hazard a prophecy, it would be that contact will win, but for the present it still excites in some people feelings akin to those aroused by split infinitives and those kind of things. So do feature, glimpse, position, sense and signature when used as verbs, though all have long since found their way into dictionaries. So do the verbs loan, gift and author, though these were verbs centuries ago, and are only trying to come back again after a long holiday, spent by loan in America, by gift in Scotland and by author in oblivion. Whatever their fate may prove to be, we shall not be disposed to welcome such a word as reaccessioned, used by a librarian of a book once more available to subscribers. To underground (of electric cables) seems at first sight an unnecessary addition to our vocabulary of verbs when bury is available, but an editor to whom protest was made retorted that bury would not have done because the cables were ‘live’.

  But these words are mere skirmishers. The main body of the invasions consists of verbs ending in ise. Among those now nosing their way into the language are civilianise (replace military staff by civil), editorialise (make editorial comments on), finalise (finally settle), hospitalise (send to hospital), and publicise (give publicity to). The reason for inventing them seems to be to enable us to say in one word what would otherwise need several. Whether that will prove a valid passport time alone can show. If the words I have listed were all, they might be swallowed, though with wry faces. But they are by no means all. A glut of this diet is being offered to us (trialise, itinerise, casualise and reliableise are among th
e specimens sent to me), and they continue to come no matter our nausea. It is perhaps significant that at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II the word Inthroning was substituted for the first time for Inthronisation, used in all previous coronations. This may be symptomatic of a revolt against the ugliness of ise and still more of isation, which Sir Alan Herbert has compared to lavatory fittings, useful in their proper place but not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary for practical purposes.

  Another popular way of making new words is to put de, dis or non at the beginning of a word in order to create one with an opposite meaning. De and dis are termed by the OED ‘living prefixes with privative force’. ‘Living’ is the right word. They have been living riotously of late. Anyone, it seems, can make a new verb by prefixing de to an existing one. Sir Alan, still on the warpath, drew up a list of a few remarkable creations of this sort, calling them ‘septic’. Among his examples were derestrict, dewater, debureaucratise, decontaminate, dedirt, dehumidify, deratizate (to eliminate rats), deinsectize,* dezincify. (The Ministry of Food, I am told, once fixed maximum prices for defeathered geese.)

  Some of these, it is to be hoped, may prove to be freaks of an occasion and will be seen no more. But there is a class that appears permanent. This comprises verbs that denote the undoing of something the doing of which called for—or at any rate was given—a special term. If to affect with gas is to contaminate, to enforce a speed limit is to restrict, and to commandeer a house is to requisition, then the cancellation of those things will inevitably, whether we like it or not, be decontaminate, derestrict and derequisition, and it is no use saying that they ought to be cleanse, exempt or release, or any other words that are not directly linked with their opposites. Most of the new dis-words since the war have been invented by economists (several by The Economist itself). Disincentive and disinflation, received at first with surprised disapproval, seem to have quite settled down. It is recognised that the old-fashioned opposites of incentive and inflation—deterrent and deflation—will not do: we need a special word for the particular form of deterrent that discourages us from working hard, and for a process of checking inflation that is something less than deflation. Yet on the heels of these new arrivals come diseconomy and dissaving: