Plain Words (9 page)

Majority

The major part
and
the majority
ought not to be used when a plain
most
would meet the case. They should be reserved for occasions when the difference between a majority and a minority is significant. Thus ‘most of the members have been slack in their attendance', but ‘the majority of members are likely to be against the proposal'.

Maximum

It is curiously easy to say the opposite of what one means when making comparisons of quantity, time or distance, especially if they are negative. A common type of this confusion is to be found in such statements as ‘Meetings will be held at not
less
than monthly intervals', when what is meant is that the meetings will be not less frequent than once a month, that is to say, at not
more
than monthly intervals.
Maximum
and
minimum
sometimes cause a similar confusion, leading to one being used for the other, as has happened in the following sentence taken from a passage condemning the wounding of wild animals by shooting at them from too far away: ‘It would be impossible to attempt to regulate shooting by laying down minimum ranges and other details of that sort'.

Mitigate

Mitigate
for
militate
is a curiously common malapropism. An example is: ‘I do not think this ought to mitigate against my chances of promotion'.

Note
. Though Gowers saw no need to explain further, he could have added that the expression ‘mitigate against' is not only curiously common but also simply curious. To
militate against
is to ‘counter' or to exert a negative force on something, but to
mitigate
means to make more bearable or to ‘appease'. ‘Mitigate against' ought therefore to have a sense akin to ‘alleviate against', which, if it means anything at all, should cancel itself out. All the same, when a former Chief of the General Staff, in an article on combat in Afghanistan, explains that ‘an unlucky shot by a rocket-propelled grenade or a machinegun at close range remains a hazard that is very hard to mitigate against', this does somehow carry the ring of truth. ~

Practical and Practicable

Practical
, with its implied antithesis of
theoretical
, means ‘useful in practice'.
Practicable
means simply ‘capable of being carried out in action', should anyone wish to do so. Something that is practicable may nevertheless be impractical (such as hoisting a loose giraffe on to the deck of a ship).

Protagonist

This word is not the opposite of
antagonist
(one who contends with another). The pair must not be used as synonyms of
supporter
and
opponent
, the
pros
and the
antis
.
Protagonist
has nothing to do with the Latin word
pro
: its first syllable is derived from a Greek word meaning ‘first'. Its literal meaning is the principal actor in a play; hence it is used for the most prominent personage in any affair. It is not necessarily associated with the advocacy of anything, although it often happens to be so in fact. When we say that Mr Willett was protagonist in the movement for summer time, we are not saying that he was
pro
summer time. We are saying that he played a leading part in the movement.
Protagonist
should not be used in the sense merely of ‘advocate' or ‘champion'.

Resource

There is much pardonable confusion between
resource
,
recourse
and
resort
. The most common mistake is to write ‘have resource to' instead of
have recourse to
or
have resort to
. The correct usage can be illustrated thus: ‘They had recourse (or had resort, or resorted) to their reserves; it was their last recourse (or resort); they had no other resources'.

Transpire

It is a common error to use
transpire
as if it meant ‘happen' or ‘occur'. It does not. It means to ‘become known'. An example of
its wrong use is: ‘I was in Glasgow, attending what transpired to be a very successful series of meetings'.

Note
. The misuse described here dates from the eighteenth century. If nowadays you were to write that something had ‘transpired' when you meant no more than that it had
happened
, you would still annoy a purist (if you could find one), whereas if you wished to suggest in a public document that something previously secret had leaked out and become known, and so correctly wrote that it had
transpired
, your precise meaning would escape all but a very few. ~

Wastage

Wastage
should not be used as a more dignified alternative to
waste
. The ordinary meaning of
waste
is ‘useless expenditure or consumption' of money, time, etc. The ordinary meaning of
wastage
is ‘loss by use, decay, evaporation, leakage, or the like'. You may, for instance, properly say that the daily wastage of a reservoir is so many gallons. But you must not say that a contributory fact is the ‘wastage' of water by householders if what you mean is that householders waste it.

Note
. Though Gowers's distinction here is no longer fully supported by the
OED
, some may still find it interesting. In modern professional jargon,
waste
is frequently referred to as ‘arisings', but that is another matter. ~

Behalf

A person who acts on your
behalf
is your agent or representative. (It used to be that someone who defended your cause or sought to further your interests acted
in
your behalf, but this distinction is now largely forgotten.) Just as it would make no sense to say that you acted ‘instead of' yourself, so it is wrong in correct English
to use the formula, ‘It was a bit of a mistake on my behalf to eat that pie'. The error here is easily amended by saying ‘It was a bit of a mistake on my part to eat that pie', but the misuse of ‘on so-and-so's
behalf
' to mean ‘on so-and-so's
part
' (or even ‘
by
so-and-so') is increasingly common.

Impunity

The
OED
defines
impunity
as meaning ‘exemption from punishment or penalty', but it is starting to be used as though it means roughly the opposite. Thus a
Guardian
journalist can write that ‘The committee was charged with examining how a Times reporter … had managed to fabricate and plagiarise dozens of stories without impunity for so long'; and a reporter for the
Independent
can explain that ‘A series of legal actions will mean that the millions of users … can no longer post their comments without impunity'. Both examples require
impunity
to mean ‘fear of punishment'—unless perhaps
without
is to be thought of as meaning ‘with'.

Incredulous

Incredulous
means ‘disbelieving', or more loosely, ‘amazed', ‘thunderstruck', and so on. In an academic paper on information display systems, discussing the real case of an aeroplane whose fuel line ruptured in flight, it is stated that the pilot found himself faced by the ‘sudden and unexpected presentation of apparently anomalous and incredulous information'. Information somehow capable of feeling disbelief would indeed be an anomaly: though the information may have seemed incredible, only the pilot could have been ‘incredulous'.

Infinitesimal

An early press release for the Visitor Centre at CERN's Large Hadron Collider advertised an exhibition that would plunge people into the fascinating world of particles, including
‘infinitesimally large' ones. It is no longer unusual to find
infinitesimally
used as though it somehow has more to it of the infinite than
infinitely
does, but in correct English
infinitesimally
is only ever used to qualify what is very small.

May

The difference between
may
and
can
is that if you
may
do something, you are permitted to do it, but to say that you
can
do it is to say no more than that, if permitted, you would be capable. Those who can build a bomb have the knowledge and wherewithal to build a bomb, but not necessarily the permission that says they may.

May
may be used to express a future possibility: ‘tomorrow it may be stormy'. But it is incorrectly substituted for the post-conditional
might
: ‘they might have got married last year, had she not been stuck in prison'. A cricket correspondent for
The Times
makes this error: ‘Had it not been for India's success in South Africa, the IPL may never have happened'. The Indian Premier League already
had
happened by the time these lines were written. (It is with us still.) The reporter meant that the IPL
might
never have happened.

Reticent

It is now common for people to use
reticent
, which means ‘reserved' and ‘likely to keep quiet', as though it has the sense of
reluctant
, or disinclined and unwilling. In a
Daily Telegraph
article about the heir to a banking family, the young man in question is described as ‘famously reticent about publicity', which is then explained as meaning ‘somewhat backward in coming forward'. If the young man is truly reticent about publicity, he is not reluctant to step into the limelight, but keeps his own counsel in the matter of publicity itself.

Up to Date

To keep something
up to date
is to keep it current. The substitutes ‘up to day' and ‘up today' are starting to creep into the language. (The next step may be ‘uptoday'.) Neither version is yet over the barrier, but
Private Eye
is keen to help, saying of the MoD's hospitality register that its details are ‘skimpy and not terribly up to day'. The notionally related phrase ‘out of day' does not yet exist, but ‘sell by day' does, bringing to mind darkened supermarket aisles haunted by revenant items from the meat counter.

Other incorrect uses that seem ever more fashionable—ones that mangle what remain the prevailing meanings of the words they confuse—include the phrase to ‘make abeyance' for
make obeisance
(to be
in abeyance
is to be temporarily dormant or in suspension; to
make obeisance
is to pay homage); ‘heart-rendering' for
heart-rending
(the first suggests melting the fat out of a piece of meat; the second means ripping the heart asunder); ‘antidotal evidence' for
anecdotal evidence
(an
antidote
is a medicine that counters the effect of a poison;
anecdotal evidence
is evidence flimsily drawn from anecdotes); ‘emerged in' for
immersed in
(‘emerged in' seems to blend
immersed in
with
submerged
, but strictly means something like ‘came out of in'); ‘lost in the midst of time', which we all are, so that it hardly seems worth saying, for
lost in the mists of time
(i.e. ‘lost in the impenetrable past'); a ‘fool's economy' for a
false economy
(the second may be the first, but a
false economy
is specifically one where the pursuit of a perceived benefit will have unfortunate consequences that outweigh the desired advantage); and ‘from the offing' for
from the off
(the
offing
is a nautical term for an area of sea that is visible from land but some way out from shore; the following job advertisement can therefore really only be aimed at a businesslike mermaid: ‘A calm and assertive individual with plenty of commercial acumen, you will be content to
work without supervision from the offing and possess outstanding organisational abilities'). ~

Idiom is defined by the
OED
as ‘a group of words established by usage as having a meaning not deducible from the meanings of the individual words'. When anything in this book is called ‘good English idiom' or
idiomatic
, what is meant is that usage has established it as correct. Idiom does not conflict with grammar or logic as a matter of course; it may be grammatically and logically neutral. Idiom requires us to say
try to get
not ‘try at getting'. Logic and grammar do not object to this, but they would be equally content with ‘try at getting'. At the same time idiom is, in Otto Jespersen's phrase, a ‘tyrannical, capricious, utterly incalculable thing' (
Progress in Language
, 1894), and if logic and grammar get in its way, so much the worse for logic and grammar. It is idiomatic—at least in speech—to say ‘I won't be longer than I can help' and ‘it's me'. That the first is logically nonsense and the second a grammatical howler is neither here nor there; idiom makes light of such things. Yet during the reign of pedantry, attempts were constantly made to force idiom into the mould of logic. We were not to speak of a criminal being ‘executed', for ‘the
person
is
prosecuted
, the
sentence executed
'; we were not to say ‘vexed question', for ‘in our English sense, many a question vexes: none is vexed'; nor ‘most thoughtless', an expression ‘inelegant and unhappy', for if a person is without thought there cannot be degrees in the lack of that quality; nor ‘light the fire', for ‘nothing has less need of lighting'; nor ‘round the fireside
'
, for that would mean that ‘some of us are behind the chimney'. So, in his
Imaginary Conversations
, argued Walter Savage Landor, sometimes as himself, sometimes in the person of Horne Tooke, but in both guises a stout and
undiscriminating defender of his language against the intrusion of the illogical.