It does not seem to me to be true to say that the language itself is in decay. Its grammatical and syntactical usages are carefully preserved, perhaps too carefully; but it is constantly being invited to assimilate new words, and seems capable of digesting many of them without any great harm, many indeed with profit. Some of the changes that have taken place in the meaning of words have weakened the language, but others have strengthened it, and on the whole there is no great cause for disquiet here. The language remains as fine and flexible an instrument as it was when used by Shakespeare and Bacon; in some respects it has been enriched. There are those alive today, and those recently dead, whose exact and delicate English would bear comparison with the outstanding writers of any generation. What is wrong is not the instrument itself but the way we use it. That should encourage us to hope that we may do better. When we are tempted to say that we have fallen away from the high standard of those who came before us, we must not forget the vast increase in the part played by the written word in our affairs. With such an increase in quantity it would be surprising if there were not some deterioration in quality. The field in which these faults are most readily noticed—the writings of officials for the guidance of the public—is relatively new. We cannot say whether the crop that grows there is better or worse than it was a hundred or more years ago, for no crop then grew there.
However unfair it may be that official English should have been singled out for derision, the fact has a significance that the official must not forget. Readers are on the lookout for tricks of style that they have been taught to expect from official writing. Shortcomings are magnified, and the difficulties that all writers have in affecting the reader precisely as they wish are for officials wantonly increased. So much the greater is the official’s duty to try to convert officialese into a term of praise by cultivating unremittingly the clarity of thought and simplicity of expression that have always been preached by those who have studied the art of writing. Thus may we learn, after the centuries-old advice that heads this chapter, how, by speaking as plain people do, and thinking as the wise, to make ourselves understood by all.
Appendix
Legal English cannot be pretty if it is to serve its purpose
A choice does sometimes have to be made between the simplicity that conveys a ready meaning and the elaboration necessary to a precise one. In Parliamentary Bills, Statutory Orders and other legal documents the choice is likely to be unavoidable. Those who are to be held irrevocably to meaning what they say must be very careful to say what they mean.
Eric Partridge slips into confusing what is unavoidable inelegance in legal English with the faults of the ordinary official, when, in Usage and Abusage, under the heading ‘Officialese’, he quotes from an article in a newspaper making fun of this extract from the Shops (Sunday Trading Restriction) Act, 1936:
the following provisions of this Act shall extend only to shops, that is to say, those provisions of section six and section eight which relate to the approval by occupiers of shops of orders made under those sections, the provisions of paragraph (e) of subsection (1) of section seven and the provisions of paragraph (e) of section twelve.
If example were needed to show that legal language is not always elegant or luminous, these few lines would serve well enough. But that needs no proof; everyone knows it.*
Moreover with the whole Act before you (and you cannot expect to understand excerpts from it otherwise), the meaning conveyed by the quotation above is precise: it says unambiguously that certain provisions of the Act apply to trading only in shops, and that all the others apply to trading not only in shops, but also in any place that is not a shop.
A real difficulty did arise over this Act, but not because of any obscurity in the words quoted by Partridge. The trouble was with the penumbra of meaning round the word place used in another section, to which this one refers. The court held that this penumbra was not as large as had been supposed. The person who drafted the Act had naturally assumed that, as it covered both sales in shops and sales in places that are not shops, its provisions were complete. But what of the stop-me-and-buy-one man? The Court held that the ice-cream vendor’s tricycle is neither a shop nor a place, and that the bit of ground on which it happens to be standing is not a place either. Sales of ice cream from a tricycle were therefore outside both categories, and the seller escaped the meshes of the Act. This curious instance of the waywardness of words shows how hard it is for the drafters of Acts to foresee every possible path down which their choice of expression may lead the judicial mind. It also provides an illustration of the truth that legal ambiguities are caused more often by diction being over-simple than over-elaborate.
To illustrate the difference between ordinary phraseology that makes its meaning plain and legal phraseology that makes its meaning certain, let us take an example at random. I open the volume of Statutory Rules and Orders for 1945, and, turning over the pages until I find a short one, alight on the ‘Rags (Wiping Rags) (Maximum Charges) (Amendment) Order’. In the summer of 1945, it appears, the President of the Board of Trade, moved perhaps by compassion for those who follow what must be a spiritually unsatisfying occupation, decided to increase the profit allowed for washing wiping rags. The Order effecting this (if we omit the common-form provisions about the Interpretation Act and the Short Title) runs as follows:
The Rags (Wiping Rags) (Maximum Charges) Order 1943 (as amended) shall have effect as if in Article 1 thereof for the figure ‘8’ where it occurs in the last line there were substituted the figure ‘11½’.
This by itself conveys no meaning at all to anybody. Because the same is true of so many Orders, instructions have been given to all departments that every Order submitted to Parliament must be accompanied by an explanatory memorandum. In this case the explanatory memorandum was:
This Order permits launderers of wiping rages to add 11½ per cent to the charges they were making during the week beginning the 31st August, 1942, for such work.
That statement is immediately intelligible. Why was it not possible for the Order itself to be equally lucid? Because, although the explanatory memorandum is probably enough to tell most people all that they want to know, it is not precise enough to give unmistakable guidance in doubtful cases, or to support a prosecution for its breach. What is a ‘wiping rag’, and what are ‘charges’? Both need definition, and both are elaborately defined in the original Order:
(i) basic charge means in relation to services to which this Order applies,
(a) the charge for such services in the ordinary course of the business in the course of which those services were being performed during the week beginning 31st August, 1942, in accordance with the method of charge then in being in relation to that business for performing such services; or
(b) the charge made for such services in the ordinary course of a substantially similar business during the said week, in accordance with the method of charge then in being in relation to that business for performing such services;
Provided that in any case in which a person who performs such services proves that such services were being performed in the course of his own business during the said week, ‘basic charge’ shall only have the meaning specified in sub-paragraph (a) of this paragraph.
‘Rags’ means any worn-out, disused, discarded or waste fabric or material made wholly or mainly from wool, cotton, silk, rayon or flax or from any mixture thereof.
‘Wiping rags’ means rags each one of which is not less than 144 square inches in size and has been trimmed and washed and is suitable for use as a wiping rag.
Why then, it may be asked, did the amending Order not repeat these definitions, and so make all clear? Because the definitions are so complicated that simply giving them again as amended (re-enactment of the Order) would have been far from making the meaning of the Order immediately clear. Research would have been necessary to find out what was old and what was new. If the whole of the old Order had been reprinted with the substitution
of 11½ for 8, not only would there have been a waste of paper, but everyone would have had to look through both old and new Orders with minute attention, merely to discover in the end that the only change was in the figure. Moreover, the two volumes of Statutory Rules and Orders for 1945 already contain no fewer than 3,000 pages. No one would ask for more.
The reader may be provoked into thinking that the washing of wiping rags can hardly be worth even the lavishness of words that it already receives. But that is beside the point. The point is that the law, whatever it is about, must be certain; and if it is necessary for the law to concern itself with washing wiping rags, it must be no less certain here than anywhere else.
A well-meant attempt was made by the minister in charge of the Bill that became the Workmen’s Compensation Act 1906 to make perfectly clear to ordinary people what sort of accidents gave rise to a right to compensation. He insisted on using the simple words ‘arising out of and in the course of’ the employment. But simplicity proved to have been bought at such a cost in precision that those words must have caused more litigation than any other eight words on the Statute Book. Halsbury’s Laws of England takes more than thirty-eight pages to explain the phrase and cite the cases on it. One of them concerns a worker who suffered burns as a result of ‘petrol used for cleaning greasy hands near stove’: though the injury took place at work, how definitely could it be said to have arisen, in the simple words of the Act, ‘out of and in the course of employment’?
Note. After Gowers had come under fire for this defence of inelegant legal English, he decided in a revision of his work, ‘by way of redressing the balance a little’, to cite a 1943 article from the Spectator that gave what he called a ‘remarkable’ example of the reaction that legal drafting could provoke in a reader:
My attention has been called (I have just invented this serviceable phrase) to Statutory Rules and Orders 1943 No. 1216, issued by the Ministry of Supply. You can buy it from the Stationery Office for a penny. Its operative clause runs thus:
1. The Control of Tins Cans Kegs Drums and Packaging Pails (No. 5) Order, 1942(a), as varied by the Control of Tins Cans Kegs Drums and Packaging Pails (No. 6) Order, 1942(b), the Control of Tins Cans Kegs Drums and Packaging Pails (No. 7) Order, 1942(c), the Control of Tin Cans Kegs Drums and Packaging Pails (No. 8) Order, 1942(d), and the Control of Tins Cans Kegs Drums and Packaging Pails (No. 9) Order, 1942(e), is hereby further varied in the Third Schedule thereto (which is printed at p. 2 of the printed (No. 6) Order), in ‘Part II. Commodities other than Food’, by substituting for the reference ‘2A’ therein, the reference ‘2A(1)’; and by deleting therefrom the reference ‘2B’.
This is excellent news, that will gladden the heart of every public-spirited citizen. Why the Ministry of Supply could not leave it at that is unimaginable. Jettisoning gratuitously the sound and time-honoured principle that a Government Department never explains, it adds—quite incredibly—an Explanatory Note, which reads:
The above Order enables tinplate to be used for tobacco and snuff tins other than cutter-lid tobacco tins.
What is to be said of this unwarrantable insult to the national intelligence? What kind of people do they think we are? Do they suppose we can’t read plain English? ~
THE BEGINNING
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First published by Particular Books 2014
Published in Penguin Books 2015
Text revisions and updates copyright © Rebecca Gowers, 2014
The moral right of the reviser has been asserted
Grateful acknowledgement is made to Faber & Faber Ltd for permission to quote from ‘Little Gidding’ by T. S. Eliot
ISBN: 978-0-241-96035-6
* This account of the life and work of Ernest Gowers and of his father draws both on a private family archive of documents, and on the writings of Ann Scott in her books William Richard Gowers 1845–1915: Exploring the Victorian Brain (Oxford University Press, 2012), written with neurologists Mervyn Eadie and Andrew Lees; and Ernest Gowers: Plain Words and Forgotten Deeds (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
* See p. 120, footnote.
* Harold Nicolson, reviewing Plain Words for the Spectator in 1948, mocked Gowers for writing in the second sentence of his book that to ‘some officials’ it might seem ‘a work of supererogation’. In The Complete Plain Words, rather than make plain ‘a work of supererogation’ (one that goes beyond the call of duty), Gowers rewrote his opening to say that he suspected his book would be received, not now by ‘some’ but by ‘many’ officials, ‘without any marked enthusiasm or gratitude’.
* 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 o
f 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. ~
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