Plain Words (12 page)

Sometimes a vague word may be preferred to a precise one because the vague is less alarming. A kindred device is to change names that have acquired unpleasant associations. Thus
distressed areas
were changed to
special areas
,
the poor
have become
the lower income brackets
,
criminal lunatics
are now
Broadmoor patients
, and
rat-catchers
,
rodent operators
. This is no doubt a useful expedient in the art of democratic government, for the power of the word is great. But the expedient has its limitations. If the unpleasantness attaches to the thing itself, it will taint the new name. In course of time yet another will have to be found, and so
ad infinitum
. We do not seem to have done ourselves much good by assigning the blameless but unsuitable word
lavatory
to a place where there is nowhere to wash; we have merely blunted the language.

There remains one more siren song to mention—that of laziness. As I observed in
Chapter I
, clear thinking is hard work. A great many people go through life without doing it to any noticeable extent. And as George Orwell (from whom I then quoted) has pointed out, ready-made phrases ‘will construct your sentences for you––even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent'. It is as though the builder of a house did not take the trouble to select with care the materials most suitable for the purpose, but collected chunks of masonry from ruined houses built by others
and stuck them together anyhow. That is not a promising way to produce anything significant in meaning, attractive in form, or of any practical use.

So much for what I have termed the ‘aetiology' of barnacular writing, though the British official is not the only (nor the worst) sufferer from the disease. Before turning to treatment it may be useful to illustrate the symptoms.

Example:

The attitude of each, that he was not required to inform himself of, and his lack of interest in, the measures taken by the other to carry out the responsibility assigned to such other under the provision of plans then in effect, demonstrated on the part of each a lack of appreciation of the responsibilities vested in them, and inherent in their positions.

Translation:

Neither took any interest in the other's plans, or even found out what they were. This shows that they did not appreciate the responsibilities of their positions.

Example:

To reduce the risk of war and establish conditions of lasting peace requires the closer coordination in the employment of their joint resources to underpin these countries' economics in such a manner as to permit the full maintenance of their social and material standards as well as to adequate development of the necessary measures.

This example seems to me to defy translation.

We can now turn to the question whether some general advice can be given to fortify the writer against infection. The Fowler
brothers tried their hand at this in their work of 1906,
The King's English
. This is what they said:

Anyone who wishes to become a good writer should endeavour, before he allows himself to be tempted by the more showy qualities, to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid.

This general principle may be translated into practical rules in the domain of vocabulary as follows: —

‘These rules,' they added, ‘are given roughly in order of merit; the last is also the least.' They also pointed out that

all five rules would be often found to give the same answer about the same word or set of words. Scores of illustrations might be produced; let one suffice:
In the contemplated eventuality
(a phrase no worse than what any one can pick for himself out of his paper's leading article for the day) is at once the far-fetched, the abstract, the periphrastic, the long, and the Romance, for
if so
. It does not very greatly matter by which of the five roads the natural is reached instead of the monstrosity, so long as it
is
reached. The five are indicated because (1) they differ in directness, and (2) in any given case only one of them may be possible.

When another distinguished figure, Quiller-Couch, discussed these rules in
On the Art of Writing
, he disagreed with the advice to prefer the short word to the long and the Saxon to the Romance. ‘These two precepts', he said, ‘you would have to modify by so
long a string of exceptions that I do not commend them to you. In fact I think them false in theory and likely to be fatal in practice.' He then gave his own rules, which, though they may be sound in content, lack the crispness he preaches, starting, ‘Almost always prefer …' and ‘Generally use …'.

I cannot set myself up as a judge between these high authorities, but as one who is now concerned only with a particular sort of prose, and who has made a close study of its common merits and faults, I respectfully agree with Quiller-Couch in refusing primary importance to the rule that the Saxon word must be preferred to the Romance, if only because it is not given to many of us always to be sure which is which.
*
Any virtue that there may be in this rule, and in the rule to prefer the short word to the long, is, I think, already implicit in the rule to prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched. Even the Fowlers said that ‘the Saxon oracle is not infallible; it will sometimes be dumb, and sometimes lie', and before ever they had propounded the rule or Quiller-Couch criticised it, Bradley, the second editor of the
OED
, had said what most people are likely to think is all that needs to be said on the subject:

The cry for ‘Saxon English' sometimes means nothing more than a demand for plain and unaffected diction, and a condemnation of the idle taste for ‘words of learned length and thundering sound,' which has prevailed at some periods of our literature. So far it is worthy of all respect; but the pedantry that would bid us reject the word fittest for our purpose because it is not of native origin ought to be strenuously resisted. (Henry Bradley,
The Making of English
, 1904)

What we are concerned with is not a quest for a literary style as an end in itself, but the study of how best to convey our meaning without ambiguity and without giving unnecessary trouble to our readers. This being our aim, the essence of the advice both of the Fowlers and of Quiller-Couch may be expressed in the following three rules, and the rest of what I have to say in the domain of vocabulary will be little more than an elaboration of them.

As the Fowlers pointed out, rules like these cannot be kept in separate compartments: they overlap. But in the next three chapters we will follow roughly the order in which the rules are set out and examine them under the headings ‘Avoiding the superfluous word', ‘Choosing the familiar word' and ‘Choosing the precise word'.

The fault of verbiage (which the
OED
defines as ‘abundance of words without necessity or without much meaning') is too multiform for analysis. But certain classifiable forms of it are particularly common, and in this chapter we will examine some of these, ending with an indeterminate class that we will call ‘padding', to pick up what has been left outside the others.

In a minute written in August 1835 by Palmerston, then Foreign Secretary, he said of one of his diplomats in South America, who had neglected an admonition to go through his despatches and strike out all words not necessary for fully conveying his
meaning: ‘If Mr Hamilton would let his substantives and adjectives go single instead of always sending them forth by Twos and Threes at a time, his despatches would be clearer and easier to read'.

It has been wisely said that the adjective is the enemy of the noun. If we make a habit of saying ‘The true facts are these', we shall come under suspicion when we profess to tell merely ‘the facts'. If a
crisis
is always
acute
and an
emergency
always
grave
, what is left for those words to do by themselves? If
active
constantly accompanies
consideration
, we shall think we are being fobbed off when we are promised bare consideration. If a decision is always qualified by
definite
, a decision by itself becomes a poor filleted thing. If conditions are customarily described as
prerequisite
or
essential
, we shall doubt whether a
condition
without an adjective is really a condition at all. If a part is always an
integral part
there is nothing left for a mere part except to be a spare part.

Cultivate the habit of reserving adjectives and adverbs to make your meaning more precise, and suspect those that you find yourself using to make it more emphatic. Use adjectives to denote kind rather than degree. By all means say an
economic crisis
or a
military disaster
, but think well before saying an
acute crisis
or a
terrible disaster
. Say, if you like, ‘The proposal met with noisy opposition and is in obvious danger of defeat'. But do not say, ‘The proposal met with considerable opposition and is in real danger of defeat'. If that is all, it is better to leave out the adjectives: ‘The proposal met with opposition and is in danger of defeat'.

Official writers seem to have a curious shrinking from certain adjectives unless they are adorned by adverbs. It is as though they were naked and must hastily have an adverbial dressing gown thrown around them. The most indecent adjectives are, it seems, those of quantity or measure such as
short
and
long
,
many
and
few
,
heavy
and
light
. The adverbial dressing gowns most favoured
are
unduly
,
relatively
and
comparatively
. These adverbs can only properly be used when something has been mentioned or implied that gives a standard of comparison. But we have all seen them used on innumerable occasions when there is no standard of comparison. They then have no meaning, and are the resort of those who timidly recoil from the nakedness of an unqualified statement. If the report of an accident says, ‘about a hundred people were taken to hospital but comparatively few were detained', that is a proper use of the adverb. But when a circular says that ‘our diminishing stocks will be expended in a relatively short period', without mentioning any other period with which to compare it, the word signifies nothing.

Sometimes the use of a dressing-gown adverb actually makes writers say the opposite of what they intended. The writer of the circular that said, ‘It is not necessary to be unduly meticulous in …' meant to say ‘you need not be meticulous', but actually said ‘you must be meticulous but need not be unduly so', with the reader left to guess when the limit of dueness in meticulousness has been reached.

Undue
and
unduly
seem to be words that have the property of taking the reason prisoner. ‘There is no cause for undue alarm' is a phrase I have seen used in all sorts of circumstances by all sorts of people, from a government spokesman about the plans of the enemy to a headmistress on the occurrence of a case of polio. It is, I suppose, legitimate to say ‘Don't be unduly alarmed', though I should not myself find much reassurance in it. But ‘there is no cause for undue alarm' differs little, if at all, from ‘there is no cause for alarm for which there is no cause', and that hardly seems worth saying.
Unduly
has of course its own proper job to do, and does it in a sentence of this kind: ‘The speech was not unduly long for so important an occasion'.

As some adjectives seem to attract unnecessary adverbs, so do some nouns attract unnecessary adjectives. I have mentioned
consideration
's fondness for the company of
active
, and I shall later refer to the inseparable companionship of
alternative
and
accommodation
.
Danger
is another word that is often given support it does not need, generally
real
or
serious
.

The special needs of children under 5 require as much consideration as those of children aged 5–7, and there is a serious danger that they will be overlooked in these large schools … There is a real danger … that the development of the children will be unduly forced …

Here we have
serious
,
real
and
unduly
all used superfluously.
Serious
is prompted by a feeling that
danger
always needs adjectival support, and
real
is presumably what grammarians call ‘elegant variation': an effort made to avoid repeating the same word.
*
Unduly
is superfluous because the word
forced
itself contains the idea of undue.
Real
danger should be reserved for contrast with imaginary danger, as, for instance, ‘Some people fear so-and-so but the real danger is so-and-so'. These things may seem trivial, but nothing is negligible that is a symptom of loose thinking.

Vague adjectives of intensification like
considerable
,
appreciable
and
substantial
are too popular. None of these three should be used without three questions being asked. Do I need an adjective at all? If so, would a more specific adjective not be better? Or, failing that, which of these three (with their different shades of meaning) is most apt? If those who write ‘This is a matter of considerable urgency' were to ask themselves these questions, they would realise that ‘This is urgent' serves them better. And those who write ‘A programme of this magnitude will necessarily take a considerable period' will find it more effective to say ‘a long time'. Strong words like
urgent
,
danger
,
crisis
,
disaster
,
fatal
,
grave
,
paramount
and
essential
lose their force if used too often. Reserve them for strong occasions, and then let them stand on their own legs, without adjectival or adverbial support.

It would be a fairly safe bet that
respective
(or
respectively
) is wrongly or unnecessarily used in legal and official writing more often than any other word in the language. It has one simple, straightforward use, and that is to link up subjects and objects where more than one is used with a single verb. Thus, if I say ‘Men and women wear trousers and skirts', you are left in doubt which wears which—which is no more than the truth nowadays. But if I add the word
respectively
, I allot (at the risk of being misleading) the trousers to the men and the skirts to the women. It can also be used in a harmlessly distributive sense, as in the sentence ‘local authorities should survey the needs of their respective areas'. But it contributes nothing to the sense here. There is no risk of local authorities thinking that they are being told to survey one another's areas. Anyway, it is neater to write ‘Each local authority should survey the needs of its area'.
Respective
and
respectively
are unnecessarily or wrongly used in a sentence far more often than they are used correctly, and I advise you to leave them alone. You can always get by without them. Here is a sentence that demonstrates one of the many traps set by this capricious word. The writer has tried to make it distribute two things among three, and so left the reader guessing.

The Chief Billeting Officer of the Local Authority, the Regional Welfare Officer of the Ministry of Health, and the Local Officer of the Ministry of Labour and National Service will be able to supplement the knowledge of the Authority on the needs arising out of evacuation and the employment of women respectively.

It is as though one were to say ‘Men and women wear trousers and skirts and knickers respectively'. Who has the knickers?

But any excessive fondness the official may have for
respective
and
respectively
is as nothing compared with the fascination they exercise on lawyers. These are the opening words of a coal-mining lease:

This indenture witnesseth that in consideration of the rents reservations and covenants hereinafter respectively reserved and contained they the said A, B and C according to their several and respective shares estates rights and interests do hereby grant to the W. Company the several mines of coal called respectively X, Y and Z and also the liberty to lay down any tramroads railroads or other roads and to connect such roads trams and railroads respectively with any other roads of similar character respectively.

Five in this small compass, with none of them doing any good, and some doing positive harm! The person who drafted this lease seems to have used the word in much the same way as the psalmist uses
Selah
, flinging it down light-heartedly whenever there was the least sense of having tramped on long enough without one. A recent example, taken from a department circular, shows the magnetism of this word: ‘Owing to the special difficulty of an apportionment of expenditure between (1) dinners and (2) other meals and refreshments respectively …'. Having taken elaborate care to arrange the sentence so as to avoid the need for
respectively
, the writer found the lure of it irresistible after all.

Definite
and
definitely
must be a good second to
respective
and
respectively
in any competition for the lead in adjectives and adverbs used unnecessarily. It can hardly be supposed that the adverb in the injunction — ‘local authorities should be definitely discouraged from committing themselves'—would make any difference to the official who had to carry it out. The distinction between discouraging a local authority definitely and merely discouraging it is too fine for most of us. Other examples are:

This is definitely harmful to the workers' health.

The recent action of the committee in approving the definite appointment of four home visitors.

This has caused two definite spring breakages to loaded vehicles.

Sir Alan Herbert wrote in
Punch
in 1936 that he would give a prize ‘to the first Foreman of the Jury to announce a verdict of “Definitely Guilty,” and another to the judge who informs the prisoner that he will be “definitely hanged by the neck till he is very definitely dead” '.

It is wise to be sparing of
very
. If it is used too freely it ceases to have any meaning. It must be used with discrimination to be effective. Other adverbs of intensification, like
necessarily
and
inevitably
, are also apt to do more harm than good unless you want to lay stress on the elements of necessity or inevitability. An automatic
inevitably
, contributing nothing to sense, is common:

The Committees will inevitably have a part to play in the development of the service.

The ultimate power of control which flows inevitably from the agency relationship.