Plain Words

by Rebecca Gowers

  ‘And now for our cry!’ said Mr Taper.

  ‘It is not a Cabinet for a good cry,’ said Tadpole; ‘but then, on the other hand, it is a Cabinet that will sow dissension in the opposite ranks, and prevent them having a good cry.’

  ‘Ancient institutions and modern improvements, I suppose, Mr Tadpole?’

  ‘Ameliorations is the better word; ameliorations. Nobody knows exactly what it means.’

  When an official does not know a minister’s mind, when perhaps the minister does not know it either, or when the minister thinks it wiser not to speak too plainly, the official’s own utterances will sometimes necessarily be covered with a mist of vagueness. Civil Service methods are often contrasted unfavourably with those of business. But to make this comparison is to forget that no board of directors of a business concern have to meet a committee of their shareholders every afternoon, to submit themselves daily to an hour’s questioning on their conduct of the business, to get the consent of that committee by a laborious process to every important step they take, or to conduct their affairs with the constant knowledge that there is a shadow board eager for the shareholders’ authority to take their place. The systems are quite different and are bound to produce different methods. Ministers are under daily attack, and their reputations are largely in the hands of their staffs. Only civil servants who have full and explicit authority from their ministers can show in important matters that prompt boldness that is said to be businesslike.

  The following extract is from a letter written by a government department to its Advisory Council:

  In transmitting this matter to the Council the Minister feels that it may be of assistance to them to learn that, as at present advised, he is inclined to the view that, in the existing circumstances, there is, prima facie, a case for …

  The extract was sent by a correspondent to The Times for ridicule, but provoked a more judicious response:

  even though mathematical accuracy may in the nature of things be unattainable, identifiable inaccuracy must at least be avoided. The hackneyed official phrase, the wide circumlocution, the vague promise, the implied qualification are comfortingly to hand. Only those who have been exposed to the temptation to use them know how hard it is to resist. But with all the sympathy that such understanding may mean, it is still possible to hold that something might be done to purge official style and caution, necessary and desirable in themselves, of their worst extravagances.

  It is as easy to slip into extravagant caution as it is to see the absurdity of it when pointed out. One may surmise that the writer of the original letter wanted the Advisory Council to advise the Minister in a certain way, but did not want them to think that the Minister’s mind was already made up before getting their advice. The writer might have achieved these ends without piling qualification on qualification and reservation on reservation. All that was needed here was to say that the Minister thought so-and-so but wanted to know what the Advisory Council thought before taking a decision.

  This example illustrates another trap into which official writing is led when it has to leave itself a bolt-hole, as it so often must. Cautionary clichés are used automatically, without thought of what they mean. There are two of them here: inclined to think and as at present advised. Being inclined to think, in the sense of inclining to an opinion not yet crystallised, is a reasonable enough expression, just as one might say colloquially ‘my mind is moving that way’. But excessive use of the phrase may provoke the captious critic to say that if being inclined to think is really something different from thinking, then the less said about it the better until it has ripened into something that can properly be called thought.* We can hardly suppose that the writer of the following thought really needed time to be sure of not being mistaken:

  We are inclined to think that people are more irritated by noise that they feel to be unnecessary than by noise that they cause themselves.

  As at present advised should be used only where an opinion has been formed on expert (e.g. legal) advice, never, as it is much too often, as the equivalent of saying: ‘This is what the Minister thinks at present, but since the Minister is human, tomorrow all may change’. That may be taken for granted.

  There is often a real need for caution, and it can tempt a writer into hedging and obscurity. But it is no excuse for either. A frank admission that an answer cannot be given is better than an answer that tries to look as if it meant something, but really means nothing. Such a reply exasperates the reader and brings the Civil Service into discredit.

  Politeness plays its part too: obscurity is less likely to give offence. Politeness often shows itself in euphemism, a term defined by the dictionary as ‘the substitution of a mild or vague expression for a harsh or blunt one’. It is prompted by an impulse akin to the one that led the Greeks to call the Black Sea the Euxine (the hospitable one) in the hope of averting its notorious inhospitableness, and the Furies the Eumenides (the good-humoured ladies) in the hope that they might be flattered into being less furious. For the Greeks it was the gods and the forces of nature that had to be propitiated. For those who govern us today it is the electorate. Hence the prevalence of what grammarians call meiosis (understatement), the use of qualifying adverbs such as somewhat and rather, and the popularity of the ‘not un-’ device. This last is useful in its place. There are occasions when a writer’s meaning may be conveyed more exactly by (say) not unkindly, not unnaturally or not unjustifiably, than by kindly, naturally or justifiably. But the ‘not un-’ habit is liable to take charge, with disastrous effects, making the victim forget all straightforward adjectives and adverbs. When an Inspector of Taxes writes ‘This is a by no means uncomplicated case’, we may be pretty sure that it is an example of meiosis. And, ‘I think the officer’s attitude was not unduly unreasonable’ seems a chicken-hearted defence of a subordinate. George Orwell recommended that we should all inoculate ourselves against the disease by memorising this sentence: ‘A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field’.

  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 responsib
ilities 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: —

  Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.

  Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.

  Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.

  Prefer the short word to the long.

  Prefer the Saxon word to the Romance.

  ‘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.

  (1) Use no more words than are necessary to express your meaning, for if you use more you are likely to obscure it and to tire your reader. In particular do not use superfluous adjectives and adverbs, and do not use roundabout phrases where single words would serve.

  (2) Use familiar words rather than the far-fetched, if they express your meaning equally well; for the familiar are more likely to be readily understood.

  (3) Use words with a precise meaning rather than those that are vague, for the precise will obviously serve better to make your meaning clear; and in particular prefer concrete words to abstract, for they are more likely to have a precise meaning.

  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’.

  VI

  The Choice of Words (2)

  Avoiding the superfluous word

  A Reader of Milton must be always upon Duty; he is surrounded with Sense, it rises in every Line, every Word is to the Purpose; There are no Lazy Intervals, All has been Consider’d, and Demands, and Merits Observation. Even in the Best Writers you Sometimes find Words and Sentences which hang on so Loosely you may Blow ’em off; Milton’s are all Substance and Weight; Fewer would not have Serv’d the Turn, and More would have been Superfluous.

  JONATHAN RICHARDSON, Explanatory Notes and

  Remarks on Milton’s Paradise Lost, 1734

  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.

  VERBOSITY IN ADJECTIVES AND ADVERBS

  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 dan
ger 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.