Under the letter H, The Economist Style Guide has an entry on what it calls ‘horrible words’. With every appearance of judiciousness, it declares, ‘Words that are horrible to one writer may not be horrible to another, but if you are a writer for whom no words are horrible, you would do well to take up some other activity’. Similar volumes on style go even further in anathematising certain words as ‘non-words’.
The term non-word was first dreamt up by philosophical Victorians hoping to hint at something mysterious: ‘By the word alone is the non-word revealed’; ‘By giving Scripture a wrong sense … men make God’s Word become their own non-word’, etc. However, non-word has long since jumped the bounds of lofty discourse and is now a word for a word that is not a word—rather as rebellious citizens under merciless political regimes are sometimes labelled ‘non-persons’. Of course, a non-word is harder than a non-person to restrain, let alone to murder.** But there are those who try; and their influence can be traced in all the hedging found below:
People feel – jargon word – empowered, they feel in charge of their destinies … (Guardian)
Thousands of men are receiving testosterone treatments funded by the HSE to combat the so-called ‘manopause’. (Sunday Times)
We live a life of many dinners, many haircuts, many nappy changes. You can’t narrate them all. You pick and choose. You (in the unlovely vernacular of our time) curate. (Guardian)
The story has, as the marketeers would put it, done a great job of enhancing the university’s brand. (Telegraph)
… when any major figure from the art or entertainment world goes, so to speak, off-piste. (Independent)
Whose heart-cockles were not thoroughly warmed this week by the sweet letter that a head teacher wrote to her pupils and that went, as they say, ‘viral’? (The Times)
… it’s all a bit ‘inspirational’—quote-unquote. (Guardian)
The actress has even gone so far as to delete all those old tweets—restarting her narrative, as it were. (Washington Post)
… a series of advertisements featuring, for want of a better word, ‘real’ people. (Guardian)
Read enough sentences of this kind, and it can start to seem a bit shabby the way their authors disavow the very words that, to all appearances, best suit their purpose.
Still, it is nothing new to express qualms about the odd ‘barbarous vocable’, as Coleridge put it, or ‘paper-sore’, A. P. Herbert’s dismissive term.** Swift, in a letter of 1712 entitled A Proposal for Correcting, Improving and Ascertaining the English Tongue, wrote of there being ‘many Words that deserve to be utterly thrown out of our Language’. A century and a half later, the American intellectual Richard Grant White would discuss at length what he called ‘monsters’ and ‘words that are not words’.** Mostly, White noted, his ‘words-no-words’ were ‘usurpers, interlopers, or vulgar pretenders’; but some he classed as ‘deformed creatures’; while others, though ‘legitimate enough in their pretensions’, he considered ‘oppressive, intolerable, useless’.
White was free to feel oppressed—naturally—if that was how it took him. But for him to say that the words that happened to oppress him were ‘useless’ was not wholly logical (logic being, he believed, immensely important). The monsters must have had their uses. Why else did he bother about them?
This question suggests itself now not least because people continue to be bothered by what they think of as lexical vulgarities, grotesqueries and abominations: the abuse is as immoderate today as it ever was. But is blanket contempt of this kind really good enough? Perhaps it is time to give our horrible words a little more thought.