VIII
The Choice of Words (4)
Choosing the precise word
And even things without life giving sound, whether pipe or harp, except they give a distinction in the sounds, how shall it be known what is piped or harped? For if the trumpet give an uncertain sound, who shall prepare himself to the battle? So likewise ye, except ye utter by the tongue words easy to be understood, how shall it be known what is spoken?
ST PAUL, First Epistle to the Corinthians
THE LURE OF THE ABSTRACT WORD
The reason for preferring the concrete to the abstract is clear. Your purpose must be to make your meaning plain. Even concrete words have a penumbra of uncertainty round them, but an incomparably larger one surrounds all abstract words. If you are using an abstract word when you might use a concrete one you are handicapping yourself in your task, difficult enough in any case, of making yourself understood.
Unfortunately the very vagueness of abstract words is one of the reasons for their popularity. To express one’s thoughts accurately is hard work, and to be precise is sometimes dangerous. We are tempted by the safer obscurity of the abstract. It is the greatest vice of present-day writing. Numerous writers seem to find it more natural to say ‘Was this the realisation of an anticipated liability?’ than ‘Did you expect to have to do this?’; to say ‘Communities where anonymity in personal relationships prevails’ than ‘Communities where people do not know one another’. To resist this temptation, and to resolve to make your meaning plain to your reader even at the cost of some trouble to yourself, is more important than any other single thing if you would convert a flabby style into a crisp one.
An excessive reliance on the noun at the expense of the verb will, in the end, detach the mind of the writer from the realities of here and now, and from when and how and in what mood the thing was done. It will insensibly induce a habit of abstraction and vagueness. To what lengths this can go may be illustrated by these two examples:
The desirability of attaining unanimity so far as the general construction of the body is concerned is of considerable importance from the production aspect.
The actualisation of the motivation of the forces must to a great extent be a matter of personal angularity.
The first, which says that it ‘relates to the building of vehicles’, means, I suppose, that in order to produce vehicles quickly it is important to agree on a standard body. The meaning of the second is past conjecture. (Its perpetrator was an economist, not an official.)
Here are two less extreme examples of the habit of using abstract words to say in a complicated way something that might be said simply and directly:
A high degree of carelessness, pre-operative and post-operative, on the part of some of the hospital staff, took place. (Some of the hospital staff were very careless both before and after the operation.)
The cessation of house-building operated over a period of five years. (No houses were built for five years.)
Note the infelicity of ‘a cessation operated’. ‘Operate’ is just what cessations cannot do.
Sometimes abstract words are actually invented, so powerful is the lure of saying things this way:
The reckonability of former temporary service for higher leave entitlement.
The following is not official writing, but as it appeared in a newspaper that never shrinks from showing up the faults of official writing, it deserves a place:
Initiation of a temporary organisation to determine European economic requirements in relation to proposals by Mr Marshall, American Secretary of State, was announced in the House of Commons this evening.
This way of expressing oneself seems to be tainting official speech as well as writing. ‘We want you to deny indirect reception,’ said the goods clerk of my local railway station, telephoning me about a missing suitcase. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘we want to make sure that the case has not reached you through some other station.’
Exponents of the newer sciences are fond of expressing themselves in abstractions. Perhaps this is unavoidable, but I cannot help thinking that they sometimes make things unnecessarily difficult for their readers. I have given an example on the last page of an economist’s wrapping up his meaning in an impenetrable mist of abstractions. Here is one from psychology:
Reserves that are occupied in continuous uni-directional adjustment of a disorder, as is the case in compensative existence, are fixed or mortgaged reserves. They are no longer available for use in the ever-varying interplay of organism and environment in the spontaneity of mutual synthesis.
(I. H. Pearse and L. H. Crocker, The Peckham Experiment, 1943)
In official writing the words availability, lack and dearth contribute much to the same practice, though they do not produce the same obscurity. Perhaps the reason those words are so popular is that we have suffered so much from what it is fashionable to call a ‘lack of availability’ of so many useful things:
The actual date of the completion of the purchase should coincide with the availability of the new facilities. (The purchase should not be completed until the new facilities are available.)
‘There is a complete lack of spare underground wire’ is not the natural way of saying ‘We have no spare underground wire’, or ‘A dearth of information exists’ for ‘We have very little information’.
POSITION AND SITUATION
The words position and situation greatly fascinate those who are given to blurring the sharp outlines of what they have to say. A debate takes place in the House of Commons about an acute scarcity of coal during a hard winter. A speaker wants to say that it is hard to imagine how the Government could have made sure of there being enough coal. Does the speaker say this? No; the thought is enveloped in a miasma of abstract words, and is given like this instead: ‘In view of all the circumstances I do not see how this situation could have been in any way warded off’. Later, someone speaking for the Government wants to strike a reassuring note, and to express confidence that we shall get through the winter without disaster. ‘We shall’, says the second speaker, also taking refuge in abstractions, ‘ease through this position without any deleterious effect on the situation.’
It fell to a master of words to make an announcement at a time of grave crisis. Sir Winston Churchill did not begin his broadcast of the 17th June 1940, ‘The position in regard to France is extremely serious’. He began: ‘The news from France is very bad’. He did not end it, ‘We have absolute confidence that eventually the situation will be restored’. He ended: ‘We are sure that in the end all will be well’.
Position and situation, besides replacing more precise words, have a way of intruding into sentences that can do better without them. These words should be regarded as danger signals, and if you find yourself using one, try to think whether you cannot say what you have to say more directly:
It may be useful for Inspectors to be informed about the present situation on this matter. (To know how this matter now stands.)
Unless these wagons can be moved the position will soon be reached where there will be no more wagons to be filled. (There will soon be no more …)
Should the position arise where a hostel contains a preponderance of public assistance cases … (If a hostel gets too many public assistance cases …)
All three sentences run more easily if we get rid of the situation and the positions.
Position in regard to is an ugly expression, not always easy to avoid, but used more often than it need be. ‘The position in regard to the supply of labour and materials has deteriorated’ seems to come more naturally to the pen than ‘It is now harder to get labour and materials’. ‘No one has any doubt’, writes the Manchester Guardian, ‘that deceased senior officials of the Civil Service have in regard to engraved on their hearts; and their successors to-day show no recovery from this kind of hereditary lockjaw.’ But it is not fair to put all the blame on officials. Even The Times is capable of saying, ‘The question of the British position in regard to the amount of authorisation’, rather than ‘the question how much Britain is to get of the amount authorised’.
Note. When Gowers came to revise Fowler, he added an entry under the heading ‘abstractitis’: the disease, he said, was endemic, and he warned that the habit of using misty, abstract words would slowly cloud a person’s thoughts, making the difficult business of clear writing even harder.
As no cure for this disease has yet been discovered, today’s body of English is abundantly spotted with new abstract words. Academics must discover their own ‘positionality’ or be damned, translators are forced to ruminate on the ‘situationality’ of what they are translating, businesses find themselves worrying about how to ‘organisationalise’ useful data, old buses are ‘allocated for air-conditionisation’, and companies that deliver parcels require ‘sortation facilities’ for their toiling ‘sortation facility operatives’.
Official writing too is nowadays speckled with words like proportionality, conditionality, operationality, interoperationality and operationalisation. Herefordshire Council is standing up for ‘greater transactionalisation’ of its services; one has the dim sense that this means getting more people to use them. The Government’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Management must face down the ‘necessary provisionality’ of the advice it receives: the fact that specialists cannot be sure how long their advice will stand. The Government in Scotland is worried about the ‘occupationalisation’ of unpaid carers, defined as ‘a task based approach to caring which looks not at the carer but only at the caring tasks’—thereby, the explanation continues, putting at risk the opportunity for unpaid carers ‘to be all that they are and want to be’, which would seem to set the bar for improving their lot rather high. A Department for Transport document on ‘highways assignments modelling techniques’ gives as its first objective, ‘To review current and foreseeable wider modelling requirements and policy analysis requirement to identify the functionality that highway assignment modelling needs to provide to meet them’. Plainly put, this means, ‘To decide how detailed our estimates of road use need to be now, and will need to be in future, so that we can work out how to produce the required estimates’. On its own, the phrase to ‘provide functionality’ means nothing much more than to be able to do something.
If there were ever an ugliness contest for words of this sort, ‘operationalisation’ would be a fair bet to win. It is most often used as though it means roughly ‘making X work’. For instance, in a report for the Department of Social Security on ways of encouraging pensioners to claim certain benefits, it is stated that a given method ‘should be … capable of operationalisation across all Benefits Agency offices’. Here ‘should be … capable of operationalisation’ means simply should work, or indeed must work. In a more insidious example, a report for the Department of Work and Pensions on ‘persistent employment disadvantage’ concerns itself deeply with the fact that how you define disabled governs who is classed as disabled. The author observes that those devising a census form must make up their minds on this matter, and speaks of a sinister ‘census operationalisation of disability’. This appears to mean that classing people as disabled makes them disabled, with the politically seductive corollary that those whom you refuse to class as disabled somehow become, and thus may (more cheaply) be treated as being, fully fit.
THE ABSTRACT APPENDAGE
This brings us to what has been called the ‘abstract appendage’; for position, situation and conditions find themselves in that role more commonly than any other words. In a letter to The Times objecting to the phrase ‘weather conditions’, the writer quotes two lines from Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘Weathers’:
This is the weather the shepherd shuns,
And so do I …
The BBC, the correspondent suggests, would be more likely to say, ‘These are the weather conditions the shepherd shuns …’.
‘Weather conditions’ can perhaps be defended as importing a larger idea than weather alone does (it embraces the conditions created by yesterday’s weather and the likelihood of tomorrow’s weather changing them). But the attack, though badly aimed, was directed against a real fault in official English. If the attack had been made the next day on the announcement that blizzard conditions had returned to the Midlands, it could not have been met with any such plea. It was not ‘blizzard conditions’ that had returned, it was a blizzard. Similarly it is both unnecessary and quaint to say that temperatures will return to ‘normal values’ instead of merely that they will return to normal. Level has also been greatly in demand of late as an abstract appendage. A correspondent has kindly presented me with a collection of hundreds of specimens, ranging from ‘pub-and-street-corner-level’ to ‘world-level’ through every conceivable intermediate level. This passion for picturing all our relationships with one another as stratifications is an odd phenomenon at a time when we are supposed to be developing into a classless State.
THE HEADLINE PHRASE
Serious harm is also being done to the language by excessive use of nouns as adjectives. In the past, as I have said, the language has been greatly enriched by this free-and-easy habit. We are surrounded by innumerable examples—War Department, Highway Code, Nursery School, Coronation Service, Trades Union Congress and so on. But something has gone wrong recently with this useful practice, and its abuse is corrupting English prose. It has become natural to say ‘World population is increasing faster than world food production’ instead of ‘The population of the world is increasing faster than the food it produces’; ‘The eggs position exceeds all expectation’ instead of ‘Eggs are more plentiful than expected’. It is old fashioned to write of the ‘state of the world’; it must be the ‘world situation’. As was observed by Lord Dunsany, writer, marksman and friend of Yeats, in his Donnellan Lectures of 1943, the fact is that ‘too many ofs have dropped out of the language, and the dark of the floor is littered with this useful word’. And so we meet daily with headlines like ‘England side captain selection difficulty rumour’.
This sort of language is no doubt pardonable in a newspaper, where as many stimulating words as possible must be crowded into spaces so small that treaties have had to become pacts; ambassadors, envoys; investigations, probes; and all forms of human enterprise, bids. Headlines have become a language of their own, knowing no law and often quite incomprehensible until one has read the article that they profess to summarise. ‘Insanity Rules Critic’ and ‘W. H. Smith Offer Success’ have quite different meanings from their apparent ones. Who could know what is meant by ‘Hanging Probe Names Soon’ without having read on and discovered that ‘The names of the members of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment will shortly be announced’? Who could guess that the headline ‘Unofficial Strikes Claim’ introduces a report of a speech by a member of Parliament who said that there was abundant evidence that unofficial strikes were organised and inspired by Communists as part of a general plan originating from abroad? I do not see how those three words by themselves can have any meaning at all. To me they convey a vague suggestion of the discovery of oil or gold by someone who ought not to have been looking for it. And if the announcement ‘Bull Grants Increase’ is construed grammatically, it does not seem to deserve a headline at all: one would say that that was no more than was to be expected from any conscientious bull.
But what may be pardonable in headlines will not do in the text, nor is it suitable in English prose generally. For instance:
Food consumption has been dominated by the world supply situation. (People have had to eat what they could get.)
An extra million tons of steel would buy our whole sugar import requirements. (All the sugar we need to import.)
The only thing that can be said for the following sentence is that it does not end ‘sites preparation’:
Everything is being done to expedite plant installation within the limiting factors of steel availability and the preparation of sites.
This should have run: ‘So far as steel is available and sites can be prepared, everything is being done to expedite the installation of plant’.
An exceptionally choice example is:
The programme must be on the basis of the present head of labour ceiling allocation overall.
Here head of labour means number of workers. Ceiling means maximum. Overall, as usual, means nothing.* The whole sentence means ‘The programme must be on the assumption that we get the maximum number of workers at present allotted to us’.
The use of a noun as an adjective should be avoided where the same word is already an adjective with a different meaning. Do not, for instance, say ‘material allocation’ when you mean ‘allocation of material’, but reserve that expression against a time when you may want to make clear that the allocation you are considering is not a spiritual one. For the same reason this phrase is not felicitous:
In view of the restrictions recently imposed on our capital economic situation …
By way of emphasising that the official is by no means the only offender, I will add an example from an American sociological book discussed in an article in The Economist:
Examination of specific instances indicated that in most cases where retirement dissatisfaction existed advance activity programming by individuals had been insignificant or even lacking.
I translate with diffidence, but the meaning seems to be:
Examination of specific instances indicated that most of those who did not wish to retire had given little or no thought to planning their future.
Note. The humour of Gowers’s example above, ‘our capital economic situation’, has dated (few people now use capital to mean splendid), but the Vatican milks a lasting joke on the same grammatical lines for the title of its weekly radio show, ‘The Latin Lover’. Of course where a double meaning of this sort has been arrived at by mistake, context will usually forestall confusion over what sense was intended. Yet faced solely with the headline, ‘Tussaud Giant Delivery Mixup Nightmare’, a reader would have no way of knowing whether a great number of standard waxwork figures had gone astray, or a single seven-footer.
Gowers’s capital joke may now be a little dusty, but his warning against the excessive use by officials of nouns as adjectives is not. The Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England wrote recently that ‘concerns are beginning to be expressed that the level of widening participation activity delivered in future may decline’. What this seems to mean, ‘declines of level-delivery’ and all, is: ‘People are starting to worry that in future fewer students from wide-ranging backgrounds will be successfully encouraged to go to university’. (Perhaps, though, ‘activity’ refers to the actual effort put into encouraging them.) In the same vein, the Office for Fair Access wishes to know about the ‘access’ efforts of ‘School Centred Initial Teacher Training providers’. These appear to be schools that train teachers on the job. The Department for Education has seen fit to sponsor an ‘Emotional abuse recognition training evaluation study’; and so it goes on. ~
ABSTRACT ADJECTIVAL PHRASES
By this I mean using a phrase consisting of an adjective and an abstract noun (e.g. character, nature, basis, description, disposition) where a simple adjective would do as well. This too offends against the rule that you should say what you have to say as simply and directly as possible in order that you may be readily understood:
These claims are of a far-reaching type. (These claims are far reaching.)
The weather will be of a showery character. (It will be showery.)
The wages will be low owing to the unremunerative nature of the work.
The translation of the last example will present no difficulty to a student of Mr Micawber, who once said of the occupation of selling corn on commission: ‘It is not an avocation of a remunerative description—in other words, it does not pay’.
Proposition is another abstract word used in the same way:
Decentralisation on a regional basis is now a generally practical proposition. (Is now generally feasible.)
Accommodation in a separate building is not usually a viable proposition. (Is not usually feasible.)
The high cost of land in clearance areas makes it a completely uneconomic proposition to build cottages in those areas. (Makes it completely uneconomic to build cottages there.)
Basis is especially likely to lead writers to express themselves in roundabout ways. When you find you have written ‘on a … basis’ always examine it critically before letting it stand:
Such officer shall remain on his existing salary on a mark-time basis. (Shall mark time on his existing salary.)
The organisation of such services might be warranted in particular localities and on a strictly limited basis. (Scale.)
The machines would need to be available both day and night on a 24-hour basis. (At any time of day or night.)
Please state whether this is to be a permanent installation or on a temporary line basis. (Or a temporary line.)
A legitimate use of basis is:
The manufacturers are distributing their products as fairly as possible on the basis of past trading.
Note. The formula ‘on an X basis’ has not gone away. Thus permanently becomes ‘on a permanent basis’; individually, ‘on a case-by-case basis’; as we go along, ‘on a rolling basis’; all the time, ‘on a 24/7 basis’. In a recent internal review by the Ministry of Defence (of a ‘control framework’ that failed to prevent the waste of hundreds of millions of pounds) the authors declare, ‘we report on an exception basis only’, apparently meaning ‘we report only on what has gone wrong’ (which probably did take up a lot of space). The Department for Transport has revealed that a new Order will ‘enable local authorities and the Secretary of State to operate the statutory highway functions listed in the Order on a contracted out basis’. The ending here presumably means ‘using private contractors’, though whether functions can be operated is another matter. The document carries on, unhelpfully, ‘These functions include … street works functions’. But at last comes the explanation: ‘Street works are works carried out by, or on behalf of, undertakers operating under a statutory right …’, which brings to mind the unwelcome image of gravediggers plugging large potholes with unclaimed corpses. ~
CLICHÉS AND OVERWORKED METAPHORS
In the course of this book I have called numerous expressions clichés. A cliché may be defined as a phrase whose aptness in a particular context when it was first invented has won it such popularity that it has become hackneyed, and is now used without thought in contexts where it is no longer apt. Clichés are notorious enemies of the precise word. To quote from Eric Partridge:
Clichés range from fly-blown phrases (‘much of a muchness’; ‘to all intents and purposes’), metaphors that are now pointless (‘lock, stock and barrel’), formulas that have become mere counters (‘far be it from me to …’)—through sobriquets that have lost all of their freshness and most of their significance (‘the Iron Duke’)—to quotations that are nauseating (‘cups that cheer but not inebriate’) and foreign phrases that are tags (‘longo intervallo’; ‘bête noire’). (A Dictionary of Clichés, 1947)
A cliché, then, is by definition a bad thing, not to be employed by self-respecting writers. Judged by this test, some expressions are unquestionably and in all circumstances clichés. This is true in particular of verbose and facetious ways of saying simple things (conspicuous by its absence, tender mercies) and of phrases so threadbare that they cannot escape the suspicion of being used automatically (leave no stone unturned, acid test). But a vast number of other expressions may or may not be clichés. It depends on whether they are used unthinkingly as reach-me-downs, or have been deliberately chosen as the best means of saying what a writer wants to say. Eric Partridge’s Dictionary contains some thousands of entries. But, as he says in his preface, what is a cliché is partly a matter of opinion. It is also a matter of occasion. Many of those in his dictionary may cease to be clichés if used carefully. Writers would be needlessly handicapped if they were never permitted such phrases as cross the Rubicon, sui generis, swing of the pendulum, thin end of the wedge and white elephant. These may be the fittest way of expressing what is meant. If you choose one of them for that reason you need not be afraid of being called a cliché-monger.
The trouble is that writers often use a cliché because they think it fine, or because it is the first thing that comes into their heads. It is always a danger signal when one word suggests another and Siamese twins are born—part and parcel, intents and purposes* and the like. There is no good reason why inconvenience should always be said to be experienced by a person who suffers it and occasioned by the person who causes it. Single words too may become clichés, used so often that their edges become blunt while more exact words are neglected. Some indeed seem to attract by their very drabness.
Those who resort carelessly to cliché are also given to overworking metaphors. I have already said that newly discovered metaphors shine like jewels. They enable a writer to convey briefly and vividly ideas that might otherwise need tedious exposition. What should we have done, in our present economic difficulties, without our targets, ceilings and bottlenecks? But the very seductiveness of metaphors makes them dangerous. New ones, in particular, tend to be used indiscriminately and soon get stale, but not before they have elbowed out words perhaps more commonplace but with meanings more precise. Sometimes metaphors are so absurdly overtaxed that they become a laughing stock and die of ridicule.*
Another danger in the use of metaphors is that of falling into incongruity: for as long as they remain ‘live’, they must not be given in a context that would be absurd if the words used metaphorically were being used literally. By a ‘live metaphor’ I mean one that evokes in the reader a mental picture of the imagery of its origin. A dead one does not. If we write ‘the situation is in hand’ and ‘he has taken the bit between his teeth’, we are going to horsemanship for our metaphors; but to most readers ‘in hand’ will be a dead metaphor, unconnected to managing a horse, so that using it would have an impact no different from ‘the situation is under control’. It is possible the second metaphor still has a little life in it, calling up for a few people, however faintly and momentarily, a horse that has taken the ‘bit’ under its own control. But ‘taking the bit between the teeth’ is probably close to dead also.
Almost all writers fall occasionally into the trap of using a live metaphor infelicitously. It is worth taking great pains to avoid doing so, because the reader who notices it will deride you. The statesman who said that sections of the population were being ‘squeezed flat by inflation’ was not then in his happiest vein, nor was the writer who claimed for American sociology the distinction of having always ‘immersed itself in concrete situations’, nor the enthusiastic scientist who announced the discovery of a ‘virgin field pregnant with possibilities’.*
OVERWORKED WORDS OFTEN USED IMPRECISELY
Among clichés and overworked metaphors represented by single words, the following deserve comment. We cannot but admit that there is no hope of checking the astonishing antics of target, and of bringing that flighty word within reasonable bounds. But we do not want any more metaphors getting out of hand like that.
Affect
Affect has won undeserved popularity because it is colourless—a word of broad meaning that saves the writer the trouble of thought. It is useful in its place, but not when used from laziness. It may be easier to say ‘The progress of the building has been affected by the weather’, but it is better to use a more precise word—hindered, perhaps, or delayed or stopped. I used to think during the war when I heard that gas mains had been affected by a raid that it would have been more sensible to say that they had been broken.
Alternative
The use of alternative for such words as other, new, revised or fresh is rife. It is generally regarded as pedantry to say that, because of its derivation, alternative must not be used where there are more than two choices. But it is certainly wrong to use it where there is no choice at all. For instance, the Ministry of Health announced one spring that owing to the severe winter the house-building programme for the year had been abandoned, and added that no ‘alternative programme’ would be issued. They might have said other, new, fresh or revised, but alternative must be wrong. There is nothing for it to be an alternative to: the old programme is torn up. Even in that popular phrase alternative accommodation, the adjective is generally incorrect, for the person to whom the accommodation is offered usually has no alternative to taking it. Innumerable examples could be given of this misuse. Here are two:
The Ministry of Transport are arranging alternative transport for the passengers of the Empire Windrush [which is at the bottom of the Mediterranean].
Billeting Authorities are requested to report any such cases as they are unable to rebillet, in order that alternative arrangements may be made.
Alternative must imply a choice between two or more things.
Appreciate
The ordinary meaning of appreciate, as a transitive verb, is to form an estimate of the worth of anything, or to set a value on it. It is therefore not surprising that it is useful to polite officials corresponding with members of the public who want more than they can get, as most of us do today. Refusals are softened by a phrase such as ‘I appreciate how hard it is on you not to have it’. But there can be no doubt that appreciate is being used by writers of official letters and circulars with a freedom that passes reason. It is often used merely by way of courteous padding, or where it would be more suitable to say understand, realise, recognise, be grateful, be obliged. ‘It would be appreciated if’ can usually be translated into ‘I shall be glad (or grateful, or obliged, or even pleased) if …’. ‘You will appreciate’ can often be better expressed by ‘you will realise’ or even ‘of course’. An effective way of curbing appreciate might be to resolve never to use it with a that clause (‘I appreciate that there has been a delay’), but always to give it a noun to govern (‘I appreciate your difficulty’).
Appropriate
This is an irreproachable word. But so too are right, suitable, fitting and proper, and I do not see why appropriate should have it all its own way. In particular, the Whitehall cliché in appropriate cases might be confined more closely than it is now to cases in which it is appropriate.
Note. A new cliché is appropriate’s opposite, inappropriate. So imprecise has inappropriate become as a term of condemnation that it is often applied in circumstances where no ‘appropriate’ contrast exists (the ‘inappropriate’ disclosure of a jury’s deliberations, or an ‘inappropriate’ sexual liaison between a teacher and a schoolchild). ~
Blueprint
This word has caught on as a picturesque substitute for scheme or plan and the shine is wearing off.
Note. Blueprint started out as a Victorian photographic term for a white image printed on a blue background. Blueprints were usually used to reproduce plans. Other examples of vocabulary springing from the Industrial Revolution and quickly taken into metaphorical use are deadbeat, backlash, safety valve, gas bag, dynamo and powerhouse. The word cliché is itself an example: it was adopted from French into English in the 1830s, and was originally a printing term for a stereotype block. If the shine was wearing off blueprint in the 1950s, it is surely now a ‘dead’ metaphor, with no confusing blueness implied. But it is perhaps still worth remembering that, as Gowers noted, ‘in the engineering industries, where it comes from, the blueprint marks the final stage of a paper design’. ~
Bottleneck
Bottleneck is useful as a metaphor to denote the point of constriction of something that ought to be flowing freely. Its use as a metaphor is not new, but it has had a sharp rise in popularity, perhaps because our economy has been so full of bottlenecks. It needs to be handled with care in order to avoid absurdity. Examples recently held up to ridicule in The Times include the ‘overriding bottleneck’, the ‘drastic bottleneck’, the ‘worldwide bottleneck’ and the ‘vicious circle of interdependent bottlenecks’. A correspondent from America has written to me of an official praised for his ability to ‘lick bottlenecks’.
Note. Though we are now also detained by metaphorical pinchpoints, chokes and phases of gridlock (even where there are no grids), ‘bottlenecks’ have not gone away. ‘We should not’, wrote Gowers, ‘refer to the biggest bottleneck when what we mean is the most troublesome one, for that will obviously be the narrowest.’ This thought cannot have struck the correspondent for The Economist who wrote recently that ‘Most Nigerians are unlikely to receive more than a few hours of mains electricity per day for many years—the single biggest bottleneck in the economy’. ~
Ceiling
This is one of the bright young metaphors that are now so fashionable, and are displacing the old fogeys. Ceiling’s victims are maximum and limit. There is no great harm in that, so long as those who use the word remember to treat it as a metaphor.
Note. Gowers objected to ceilings being ‘increased’ rather than raised, let alone to them being ‘waived’, and added that ‘our normal relationship to a ceiling is to be under it, not within it’. He particularly despaired of metaphorical ceilings being mixed up with metaphorical floors (‘The effect of this announcement is that the total figure for 1950–51 of £410 million can be regarded as a floor as well as a ceiling’), or indeed with actual floors (‘In determining the floor-space, a ceiling of 15,000 square feet should normally be the limit’).
Those who use ceiling comparably freely today would no doubt argue that, with blueprint and bottleneck, it has become a dead metaphor. (The more particular glass ceiling is, by contrast, still live, continually being smashed and shattered, or not smashed and shattered but bumped against and longingly peered through.) But a metaphorical ceiling can still be abused in ways that risk suggesting ‘undesirable ideas to the flippant’. Another recent contributor to The Economist, writing about euro bonds, reported on the unconvincing suggestion that a ‘flexible ceiling would act as an automatic stabiliser …’, and on the belief that ‘the respective share of wayward countries would be reduced as their ceilings were reduced …’ (presumably ‘lowered’), the counter view being that ‘if the ceiling was in any way perceived as being soft … the disciplining effect … disappears’. It is a fearful thought that anybody should seek to maintain discipline by emphasising the hardness of a ceiling. ~
Decimate
To decimate is to reduce by one-tenth, not to one-tenth. It meant originally to punish mutinous troops by executing one man in ten, chosen by lot. Hence by extension it means to destroy a large proportion. The suggestion it now conveys is usually of a loss much greater than a tenth, but because of the flavour of exactness that still hangs about it, it should not be used with an adverb or adverbial phrase. We may say ‘The attacking troops were decimated’, meaning that they suffered heavy losses, but we must not say ‘The attacking troops were badly decimated’, and still less ‘decimated to the extent of 50 per cent or more’. The following truly remarkable instance of the misuse of decimate, taken from a penny dreadful, was given in the course of correspondence in The Times: ‘Dick, hotly pursued by the scalp-hunter, turned in his saddle, fired and literally decimated his opponent’.
Note. Gowers’s account here is of the Roman origin of decimate. When the word was first imported into medieval English, it was used to mean taking a tax of one-tenth, and a ‘decimator’ was a tax collector. But its use in the imprecise sense of inflicting huge damage has been common in English for at least two centuries. Those who continue to believe that this meaning is incorrect because it defies the word’s etymology commit themselves, by the same argument, to insisting that a journey can last only one day, and a period of quarantine, forty. Nevertheless, enough people do know the strict meaning of decimate that to manhandle the word as Gowers describes above is still to risk seeming under-informed. ~
Involve
The meaning of this popular word has been diluted to a point of extreme insipidity. Originally it meant wrap up in something, enfold. Then it acquired the figurative meaning entangle a person in difficulties or embarrassment, and especially implicate in a crime or a charge. Then it began to lose colour, and to be used as though it meant nothing more than include, contain or imply. It has thus developed a vagueness that makes it the delight of those who dislike the effort of searching for the right word, and is therefore much used, generally where some more specific word would be better and sometimes where it is merely superfluous. (In its superfluous uses, it is matched by entail.)
The additional rent involved will be £1. (Omit involved.)
We have been informed that the procedure involved would necessitate lengthy negotiation. (Omit involved.)
Much labour has been involved in advertising. (… expended in advertising.)
This would possibly involve the creation of a precedent that might embarrass the Government. (This would possibly create a precedent that …)
The Company would oppose this application unless compensation involving a substantial sum were paid. (… unless a substantial sum were paid in compensation.)
Such are some of the sadly flabby uses to which this word of character is put. Reserve it for more knotty purposes and especially for use where there is a suggestion of entanglement or complication, as we would use involved when we say ‘this is a most involved subject’.
Issue
This word has a very wide range of proper meanings as a noun, and should not be made to do any more work—the work, for instance, of subject, topic, consideration and dispute.
Note. The workload of issue has grown enormously since Gowers wrote this, not least because it now also doubles up on the job hitherto done by problem. Thus a government department these days might release a disastrous consultation paper in terms of issues to do with interoperability issues, even as a Minister has personal issues that threaten to become an issue in the press, causing the Prime Minister to have a major issue with the Minister. In short, Gowers’s warning went unheeded, and issue is being made to labour harder than ever. ~
Overall
The favour that this word has won over the past few years is astonishing. It is an egregious example of the process I described as boring out a weapon of precision into a blunderbuss. Indeed the word seems to have a quality that impels people to use it in settings in which it has no meaning at all.
Examples of its meaningless use are:
The overall growth of London should be restrained.
Radical changes will be necessary in the general scheme of Exchequer grants in aid of local authorities, therefore, to secure that overall the policy of the Government in concentrating those grants as far as possible where the need is greatest is further developed. (Here overall is an adverb.)
The Controller should assume a general overall responsibility for the efficient planning of all measures.
When overall is not meaningless, it is commonly used as a synonym for some more precise word, especially aggregate, average and total, but also supreme, overriding, comprehensive, absolute and others.
For aggregate:
Compared with the same week a year ago, overall production of coal showed an increase of more than 100,000 tons. (i.e. ‘deep-mined plus opencast’.)
For average:
The houses here are built to an overall density of three to the acre.
I have made a note of the overall demand of this company for the next year.
For supreme:
Vice-Admiral Duncan, of the United States Navy, was in overall command.
For overriding:
They came forward as witnesses because of the overall fear of being involved in a capital charge.
For comprehensive:
An overall plan for North Atlantic Defence measures was approved yesterday by the Defence Minister at the Hague.
For bird’s-eye:
Our observer will be in the control tower, where he will have an overall view of the aerodrome.
For absolute:
The Conservatives will have an overall majority in the new Parliament.
For on balance:
The purpose of the plan is to enable a larger initial payment to be made and correspondingly lower payments subsequently, entailing an overall saving to the customer. (… leading on balance to a saving for the customer.)
Overall is also used to mean altogether, whole, on the whole, generally, complete. According to the dictionaries, it means ‘including everything between the extreme points’, as one speaks of the overall length of a ship. For this purpose it is useful, but it is high time that its excursions into the fields of other words were checked. So pervasive is the word now that it is a pleasant surprise to come across an old-fashioned general in such sentences as:
These reports may be used for obtaining a general picture of the efficiency of a given industry.
Although Europe’s general deficit with the outside world fell by over $2 billion during 1949, its deficit with the United States fell hardly at all.
Most writers today would say ‘overall picture’ and ‘overall deficit’ almost automatically.
Percentage, Proportion, Fraction
Do not use the expression a percentage or a proportion when what you mean is some, as in:
This drug has proved of much value in a percentage of cases.
The London Branch of the National Association of Fire Officers, which includes a proportion of station officers …
Here percentage and proportion pretend to mean something more than some, but do not really do so. They fail to give the reader any idea of the number or proportion of successful cases, or of station officers. One per cent is just as much ‘a percentage’ as 99 per cent. So for that matter is 200 per cent.
Do not forget the simple words many, few and some: use percentage or proportion only if you want to express not an absolute number but the relation of one number to another, and can give at least an approximate degree of exactitude. Though you may not be able to put an actual figure on the percentage or proportion, you can at any rate say ‘a high percentage’, ‘a large proportion’, ‘a low percentage’, ‘a small proportion’.
But fraction is different. It has become so common to use ‘only a fraction’ in the sense of ‘only a small fraction’ that it would be pedantry to object that 999/1000 is as much a fraction as 1/1000, just as it would certainly be to point out to anyone who says ‘He has got a temperature’ that 98 degrees is just as much ‘a temperature’ as 104.
Realistic
This word is becoming dangerously popular. What is realistic is what the writer thinks sensible. Realistic is ousting words like practical, feasible, sensible itself, and workmanlike. Everything nowadays seems to be either ‘academic’ or ‘realistic’.
Target
Of all the metaphors that have been called on to help in restoring our balance of trade, target has been the most in demand. We are urged not only to reach and attain our targets, but also to fight for them, to achieve them and obtain them. We must not be lulled by a near target. It is discouraging to be a long way short of our target and (what seems to amount to the same thing) to be a long way behind it, but it is splendid to be a long way beyond it. ‘Target in danger’ means that it is in no danger of being hit, and ‘target in sight’ is intended to be exceptionally encouraging to those who are trying to hit it. In fact targets have got completely out of control. We must regard the life of this metaphor as having been as short as it certainly has been merry, and treat it as dead, driven into an early grave by overwork. Then we can all do anything we like to a target without giving offence to anyone. But readers ought not to be tried too hard. Not even the exigencies of newspaper language can excuse the headline ‘Export Target Hit’ to introduce the news that, owing to a dock strike, the export target is unlikely to be hit.
Note. Gowers’s metaphorical shoulders would no doubt have sagged even further had he known that for ‘minimum standards’ the Department for Education would one day substitute ‘floor targets’, with much trumpeting of ‘rising floor targets’ (see ‘Ceiling’ above).
Some institutions have now succumbed instead to ‘goal-directed motivational systems’, but targets remain hugely popular, and have even reached the point of striking back—or so the Guardian reports, saying of a new set of exam standards: ‘targets will hit disadvantaged’. ~