Plain Words (35 page)

*
The proper meaning of
jargon
 is writing that employs technical words not commonly intelligible.
Catachresis
, for instance, is grammarians' jargon for using a wrong word in a wrong sense. Those grammarians who call writing jargon merely because it is verbose, circumlocutory and flabby, themselves commit the sin of catachresis that they denounce in others.

*
Though in 1948 Gowers put legal English outside the scope of
Plain Words
for the reasons given above, in doing so he made the argument that legal writing could not be elegant and still serve its purpose. He was immediately accused by critics of having a ‘blind spot' and of being ‘too indulgent to legal draftsmen'. Gowers was not markedly contrite in reply, but other authors have since dedicated whole books to battling ‘legalese': they continue even now to hold him accountable in their work for having exaggerated the difficulty of making legal English simpler. For anyone who is curious about this debate, Gowers's argument is given in more detail in the Appendix on
p. 274
. ~

*
See
pp. 189
–
90
for choosing between the department
has
 or
have
,
is
 or
are
, etc.

*
On which see
pp. 209
–
10
.

*
The 
OED
defines a
blunderbuss
as ‘A short gun with a large bore, firing many balls or slugs, and capable of doing execution within a limited range without exact aim'. Its name derives from words meaning ‘thunder box'.

*
Gowers was right—they did and have. In an early reprint of
The Complete Plain Words
 he added his own footnote here to say that a Scottish friend had written to him, full of reproaches, describing the English definition of
haver
 as ‘utterly damnable', and concluding (after further furious comment) ‘I deplore your weak-kneed acquiescence'. ~

*
On the redundant use of
mutual
in the phrase ‘mutually contradictory', see
p. 105

†
The two meanings of
aggravate
 continue to cause trouble, not least because it is sometimes unclear which of them is intended. What is meant, for example, when the
Daily Mail
 reports that a certain footballer is ‘in danger of missing out after aggravating injury'? ~

*
On the question whether this should be
ise
 or
ize
see
pp. 70
–
71
.

*
In 1950, Gowers received a modestly triumphant letter from a friend at the Ministry of Health: ‘I have got “deratting” into our own Port Regulations … The present drafts use “deratting” and say the ship “should be cleared of rats” instead of “subjected to measures of deratisation” '. Less cheering news was that the World Health Organisation had switched from ‘disinsectisation' to the barely improved ‘disinsection', which Gowers's correspondent felt should mean (if anything at all) ‘healing a cut'. ~

*
Gowers's ‘time-honoured' example now marks a different sort of decline in standards, as today's Chancellors of the Exchequer appear to have few qualms about leaking details of their budget statements. ~

*
The obscure term ‘barnacular', which Ivor Brown attempted to popularise in the 1940s, was designed to invoke the Tite Barnacles of the Circumlocution Office in
Little Dorrit
. ~

†
Ecclesiastes 9:11, ‘I returned, and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all'.

*
A slightly different version of this little essay, ‘The Bird and the Beast', appeared in a Classics journal of the 1940s, where it was translated into Greek. There its author was described as being an evacuee, and, in a later reprint, as a schoolgirl. ~

*
This list continues to grow, so that we now also have, among others,
roadmaps
,
pinch-points
,
cut-off points
 and
core goals
. ~

*
A Civil Service correspondent takes me to task for having dealt too leniently with this phrase, which he calls a ‘monstrosity': it is one, he says, that ‘the cynic regards as being typical of the civil servant, who is (in his eyes) incapable of decisive thought'. Perhaps it is wise to avoid a form of words that can arouse feelings of that sort in anyone. In
The Valley of Fear
, Sherlock Holmes reacts in the same way: ‘ “I am inclined to think —” said I. “I should do so,” Sherlock Holmes remarked impatiently'.

*
The debate here may not be wholly clear to all readers. It is possible by being selective to make a powerful argument in favour of English words of Anglo-Saxon origin. John Newton's famous hymn on the subject of ‘faith's review and expectation' opens, ‘Amazing grace! (how sweet the sound) That sav'd a wretch like me!' Both
sweet
 and
wretch
 are ‘Saxon' words (
swoete
 and
wrecca
) first recorded in Old English in the ninth century. Later Romance vocabulary (largely courtesy of the Norman invaders under William the Conqueror) gave English the alternatives
dulcet
 and
miscreant
; and educated seventeenth-century taste spawned the further Latinate options
sacchariferous
,
mellisonant
 and
reprobate
. Not a soul could believe that Newton's hymn would be improved by choosing substitutes from among these Romance barnacles: ‘Amazing grace! (how sacchariferous the sound) That sav'd a miscreant like me!' Yet
grace
 and
save
 are also Romance words, and some of us have need of
saving graces
. As for the idea that only our ‘Saxon' words are earthy: to purge English of its Latin and Old French influences would require that we deny ourselves
sex
 and
violence
, and how popular would that be? ~

*
For more on ‘elegant variation' see
pp. 203
–
4
.

*
The phrase
in case of
 can, however, be ambiguous, for example as it is found on the sign that says, ‘In case of fire do not use the lift'. ~

*
See also
pp. 178
–
9
for superfluous use of
both
.

*
We seem to have grown used to the idea that ‘extra virgin' is a legitimate standard of purity, but the popular phrase ‘very real' is now a source of irritation to many. It is not new. In 1812 an anonymous ‘Society of Gentlemen', translating the work of Emanuel Swedenborg, felt driven to explain that ‘the divine truth proceeding from the divine good is the very very real'. ~

*
For more about
appreciate
 see
pp. 153
–
4
.

*
The
OED
cites this sentence as its sole example of a use of the word
Micawberite
, wrongly implying by its definition that Gowers meant to invoke Micawber, the ‘feckless optimist'. Gowers may have been unusual in wishing instead to pay tribute to Mr Micawber's translations into plain English (the example above is taken from
chapter 11
of
David Copperfield
), but he was not the first to use ‘Micawberite' itself. This term, with the
OED
's meaning, was in circulation at least as far back as the 1880s. The
Michigan Argonaut
mentions ‘obsequious Micawberites' in 1884; the
Westminster Review
in 1895 compares Micawberites to ostriches; and in a 1906 issue of the
Outlook
, a weekly review, the vulnerable Micawberite is conjured up in an attack on the hire-purchase system. ~

*
The
Times
columnist who rejected the word
personnel
out of hand might even so have been provoked into letting off a new jet of steam at the idea that it would one day be being used of single members of the human race, as is demonstrated by these instructions for ‘vehicle extrication': ‘To properly and safely conduct rescue-lift air bag operation, a minimum of five personnel are required: one personnel tending to the patient, two personnel on each side …, one personnel managing the rescue-lift air bag controls, and one personnel as the officer in control …'. (This list does not even add up to five, unless ‘two personnel on each side' is taken to mean
one
on each side.) ~

*
It was whimsical of Gowers to mention ‘Upharsin' in a paragraph on jargon. This word, from the Aramaic, appears in the Bible, in the Book of Daniel, as an element in ‘the writing on the wall'. ‘Mene Mene Tekel Upharsin' is inscribed by floating fingers on a piece of plaster in the palace of King Belshazzar. The King, seeing unattached fingers at work, is so terrified that the ‘joints of his loins' are loosed. The words are a message from God. Only Daniel can interpret them. Daniel tells Belshazzar that he has been ‘found wanting' and that his kingdom will be divided. In the night King Belshazzar is slain. ~

*
For more on
overall
, see
pp. 159
–
161
.

*
In the decades since Partridge and Gowers wrote disparagingly of the cliché
to all intents and purposes
, it has given rise to a corrupted version of itself, ‘
to all intensive purposes
'. This is no improvement on the original. ~

*
Gowers confidently gave as examples
explore every avenue
and
leave no stone unturned
, but decades later both soldier on, yet to hit the buffers. ~

*
The Deputy Prime Minister not so long ago roundly declared, ‘We will not balance the books on the backs of the poor'. ~

*
It is a particular danger of the truncated language of a newspaper headline that its words will group themselves together to suggest an unintended meaning, as in this example, which introduces a report on an auction of Nazi artefacts: ‘Cards from Himmler to mother as Nazis spread across Europe on sale'. But no such excuse can be made for the following sentence, taken from the
Guardian
: ‘The statement effectively casts doubt on psychiatry's predominantly biomedical model of mental distress—the idea that people are suffering from illnesses that are treatable by doctors using drugs'. ~

*
See
p. 246
.

†
See
p. 251
.

*
For more on split infinitives, see
pp. 232
–
6
.

*
For more on ‘
I
and
me
' and on ‘
who
and
whom
' see
pp.207
–
8
and
218
–
20
.

*
For more on the awkwardness of
that
, see
p. 216
.

*
This appears to be a reference to the early jazz song, ‘I Ain't Gonna Give Nobody None of my Jelly Roll'. Gowers writes that his comic singer is ‘not misunderstood' (even though the song title given here is a shade more euphemistic than the original). But what he fails to mention is that ‘ain't' makes the statement a triple negative, which is strictly much more complicated than a mere double. That said, it is presumably true even of this example that no one is likely to misunderstand the
not
giving. ~

*
On phrasal verbs see also
pp. 108
–
110
.

†
Though Churchill, if indeed he made this joke, would not have been the first to do so, he endorsed
Plain Words
in Parliament without correcting the story. ~

*
Babies remain vulnerable to ambiguity about antecedents, as a story from the
Guardian
shows: ‘Breastfeeding babies will need their own tickets for 2012 Olympics—even if they weren't conceived when they went on sale'. The Chairman of the London Games, challenged on this point, described it as an anomaly that some people had bought ‘tickets that have subsequently had babies'. ~

*
‘Elegant variation' used to be an accepted feature of fine writing, as is shown by this remarkable extract from
The Times
of 1848, in which readers are alerted to a demonstration of M. Molk's newly invented ‘electric searchlight': ‘At this period of the evening the moon will be in its zenith, but M. Molk does not apprehend any sensible diminution of the lustre of his light from the presence of that beautiful luminary'.

*
See also
pp. 243
–
5
for punctuating relative clauses.

*
See
pp. 182
–
3
.

*
This quotation is taken from Forster's essay of 1935 ‘The Menace to Freedom'. When he later republished it in
Two Cheers for Democracy
, he corrected the line to read ‘a creature who, we pretend, is here already …'. ~

*
For this misuse of a comma see also
pp. 245
–
6