It is a widely agreed principle of Good English style that a person should not write too ‘high’. Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, splendid repository of eighteenth-century London street-slang, unsurprisingly contains several entries hostile to vocabulary lying at the other end of the scale. A binnacle word is defined as ‘a fine or affected word’, one ‘sailors jeeringly offer to chalk up on the binnacle’ (the box that houses a ship’s compass). Break-teeth words are ‘Hard words, difficult to pronounce’. And word grubbers are ‘persons who use hard words in common discourse’. Fair enough. Yet in the history of lexical mud-slinging, it is not Grose’s low speakers alone who have taken this stance. Francis Bacon, revered essayist, in his 1625 remarks on ‘Vain-glory’, is no less hostile to fine or affected language when he translates a French proverb into the English form ‘Much bruit,** little fruit’. A century or so later, in his famous work An Essay on Criticism, 1711, Alexander Pope laid down more precisely—in heroic couplets—the following observation: ‘As Shades more sweetly recommend the Light, / So modest Plainness sets off sprightly Wit’. And a century after that, William Hazlitt, yet another venerated essayist, in a Table Talk reflection of 1822 ‘On Familiar Style’, would disparage verbal immodesty once again: ‘Any one may mouth out a passage with a theatrical cadence, or get upon stilts to tell his thoughts’, he said; it was all too easy ‘to use a word twice as big as the thing you want to express’. Indeed, from Shakespeare’s blinkered Holofernes criticising one who ‘draweth out the thread of his verbosity, finer than the staple of his argument’, to V. H. Collins in 1956 decrying ‘the show words of the sham erudite’—and beyond—the disdain for fancy language is the same.
But what exactly are these too-big, fancy ‘show’ words, and where do they come from?
It does not take much idling through back numbers of the Provincial Medical Journal to find that on 7 February 1844, an unhappy vicar was driven to send a letter from his ‘very retired’ Lincolnshire village in protest at recent changes to medical vocabulary. Warming to his subject, the poor cleric then commented on a wider fad for over-classicising and Frenchifying ordinary English. His honest barber, he said, had been succeeded by a peruquier (French for ‘wig maker’). Instead of soap, this peruquier fellow was selling rhypophagon (Greek for ‘dirt-eater’). Rather than ‘spatterdashes’—forerunners of spats—the wretched local saddler had started to sell antigropelos (Greek for ‘against wet mud’). And the list goes on.** Most people would probably agree even now that peruquier, rhypophagon and antigropelos come across as a bit much: ‘horrid barbarisms’, the oppressed vicar calls them. He, however, could not conceal his kinder nature, concluding at the last, ‘I suppose it was a little innocent vanity’.
Though French and Greek are the ultimate source of a good number of our break-teeth words, Latin is always held up as guilty of supplying more. A hundred years after Hazlitt argued for the merits of a familiar style, Fowler, in his Dictionary of Modern English Usage, popularised the notion of some words being ‘genteelisms’—if not twice, then at least one-and-a-bit times ‘as big as the thing you want to express’. As Fowler himself explained it, a genteelism was not the ‘ordinary natural word’, but a synonym ‘thought to be less soiled by the lips of the common herd, less familiar, less plebeian, less vulgar, less improper, less apt to come unhandsomely betwixt the wind and our nobility’. He listed among his examples using assist rather than help, cease rather than stop, expectorate rather than spit and proceed rather than go. In each case, this is a warning against a word with its roots in Latin.
Fowler was by no means the first to deprecate this special, slightly elevated, Latin-inflected register. In Middlemarch, the language of Mr Borthrop Trumbull, auctioneer, attracts comment from the narrative voice in the text, when he remarks, ‘ “I have just been reading a portion at the commencement of ‘Anne of Jeersteen.’ It commences well” ’. Parenthetically, the narrator notes, ‘(Things never began with Mr Borthrop Trumbull: they always commenced, both in private life and on his handbills)’.**
But is it really so wrong to use commence for begin, and if so, why? Ambrose Bierce, in 1909, ruled on this very point when he described commence as ‘not actually incorrect, but—well, it is a matter of taste’. Kingsley Amis, taking his turn on the topic, was no more helpful. The two were more or less synonymous ‘in a way’, he said, and then added, without explaining: ‘only someone with no feeling for words would treat them as interchangeable’. The dusty definition of commence that even now lingers in the OED similarly draws unflattering comparisons with begin. Commence, which came into English in 1320 via Old French, is the ‘more formal’ of the two, the OED states; it classes the Germanic begin, three centuries older, as being ‘native’, and therefore ‘preferred for ordinary use’.** To see commence marked as not-so-native after it has been in the language for 700 years may strike the casual reader as odd; yet the prejudice laid bare here, and still held up by the OED, has seeped into twenty-first century thinking as well.
Genteelly opting to commence rather than begin is only one type of Latinate English at which those from the school of modest plainness look askance. In 1824, in his novel Redgauntlet, Scott (again) defined slang as ‘thieves-Latin’, meaning, it seems, the obscure tongue of the underclass. To this it is worth observing in reply that actual Latin has often supplied the obscure slang of the ruling classes—by some lights, the very definition of thieves themselves. A shabby evasiveness marks many of their Latin-heavy uses even today: job cuts explained as readjustments; aerial bombing raids said to have resulted in insurgents being degraded; such opaque expressions as interpolated terminal reserve, liquidity constraints, dematerialised securities and extraordinary rendition. Nor could a Lincolnshire vicar of our own time, no matter how retired, suppose that it was merely ‘a little innocent vanity’ that led the American intelligence agencies to start referring to a disposition matrix when they meant what the rest of us would call their ‘kill list’.
Who might be excused the use of hard words? A philosopher, maybe? Bishop Berkeley declared in 1713 that although his writings were there to be ‘thorowly understood’, by goodness you could expect to have to work at it. ‘I may perhaps be obliged’, he said, ‘to use some Ambages, and Ways of Speech not common’ (ambage, from the Latin, is in origin a term for a circumlocution; it came to us via the French, where it picked up the further meaning of a quibble or an ambiguity). But even if one were to cave in and meekly grant that obscure terms might be essential to an obscure subject, what of the ‘word grubber’, the person who, in the dismissive definition supplied by Francis Grose, uses ‘hard words in common discourse’—or who, in Hazlitt’s way of looking at things, exhibits ‘arbitrary pretension’?
A keen student of the works of Will Self will soon be equipped to dream of prefructive viridity, intercrural fulguration, ensorcelled abulia, and other wonders. But not every passing newspaper reader who alights on one of Mr Self’s articles is going to be prepared to labour in order to take his meaning. Mr Self’s own response to these presumed lexical minnows is that they are ‘anti-intellectual’ and represent the ‘banal middlebrow’**—to which the banal, anti-intellectual, middlebrow object of his scorn can but vouchsafe the silent reply (presumably in Mr Self’s view woefully latebrous**) that it obumbrates**—and so lumbers with tiresome cunctation**—even the most aliped** of arguments to have it served up in an altitonant** style;—and further, that Mr Self’s more snogly** chosen words are mishits so fraught with aliety** that they must leave obcaecate** analphabets** aerumnous,** and on the evidence do leave some positively estuating,** their thoughts, not elevated, but inspissated** with agelastick** resentment.
A second ‘banal’ or ‘anti-intellectual’ point might be this: that when readers come upon a word they have never previously encountered, and one that they do not then find to be used by anyone they ever meet—say ensorcelled** for bewitched—it will permanently lack, as Hazlitt puts it, ‘precise associations’, or in other words, subtlety in how it plays into register—with the inevitable consequence that its effect will be that of a blunt instrument, not a weapon of refinement.
By now you may be mentally placing yourself among the minnows, determined to keep your choice of words as modest as possible. You are perhaps repelled by the impenetrable slang of the oppressors, some of whom must justify so much more than their love of classical euphemisms. You, at a venture, staggered through the run of ambages above. Fine—and yet if you wish to oppose the gripers in their rigid declarations about what constitutes Good English style, you must at least consider the advantages to your cause of an over-uppish register.
The immediate thought might be that you should commence commencing, opining, residing, proceeding, apprising, and the like. The least bias in your English towards this primly Latinate vocabulary will attract the contempt of what Addison called ‘your little Buffoon Readers’.** And if you draw the fire of your foes by this means, with all their strictures on what is ‘preferred for ordinary use’, you will be showing solidarity with the many poor souls who totter in your wake—today’s Borthrop Trumbulls, who so doggedly trade in these words even now, and in the process helplessly defeat themselves in their desire to command a modicum of respect.** Given your aims, this would be an honourable and good-natured course for you to take—but be aware that in promoting this mildly elevated register, you would be joining a war of attrition that you could not reasonably hope to live long enough to win.
Possibly a more desirable course of action would be to attempt to unnerve your enemies by aping those writers who are prepared to be fancily incomprehensible. This is not as hard to pull off as you might imagine. A word grubber like Will Self must privately sweat over the question of whether or not he is a fine user of his fine lexicon, and thus a good guide to writing with it well. You, however, are blessedly free of the need to entertain yourself with such worries. Milton stirred himself to invent intervolve, horrent, omnific, displode and pontifice. You have merely to turn to a reasonable dictionary and it will supply you with countless such words that hardly anyone knows offhand how to define, or even dimly recognises. Nor do you need to present yourself as a latter-day Bishop Berkeley, choosing clinquant** vocabulary as a way to give helpful ansation** to your arguments (whatever they may be). No, your drift into the world of ambages will be in pursuit of something far simpler—what in Daniel Deronda George Eliot called ‘the odour of departed learning’. True, with this musty insult to the nostrils you will dismay just about everyone—from seething gripers, through the ‘banal middlebrow’ (if there is a difference), to those who wrap their thoughts in common, coarse, colloquial, low English. But it is above all the gripers who will be thrown off by your copperplate obscurity. They may vaunt a plain style, but faced with break-teeth words, they will sneakingly fear that they have been outsmarted at their own game: the game of knowing best. What—they will wonder in a panic—if these are the show words, not of the sham erudite, but of the actually erudite—of those who know even better? Once you have knocked them off their perches, and have them temporarily at your mercy, who knows what you may not achieve? As our man Hazlitt disapprovingly observed, ‘When there is nothing to be set down but words, it costs little to have them fine’. Friend, go ahead and help yourself.