PENGUIN BOOKS
Compose Yourself
Harry Blamires, a graduate of University College, Oxford, was formerly Dean of Arts and Sciences at King Alfred’s College, Winchester. He was Visiting Professor of English Literature at Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1987. The University of Southampton has awarded him a D.Litt. in recognition of his achievements as a writer. His total output of some thirty books includes fiction and theology, but he is widely known for his works of literary history and criticism. These include A Short History of English Literature (Routledge) and Twentieth-Century English Literature (Macmillan). For over three decades students in the USA and the UK have benefited from his classic guide to Joyce’s Ulysses, The New Bloomsday Book. He is also the author of The Penguin Guide to Plain English.
PENGUIN BOOKS
PENGUIN BOOKS
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First published 2003
1
Copyright © Harry Blamires, 2003
All rights reserved
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Except in the United States of America, this book is sold
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ISBN: 978-0-14-192264-5
Introduction
1 Finding the Right Word
2 Topic and Treatment
3 The Nuts and Bolts of Writing
4 Assembling and Separating
5 Blending Word with Word
6 ‘In a Manner of Speaking’
7 ‘What are You Talking About?’
8 Compression and Omission
9 Sense and Nonsense
10 Reasoning and Explaining
Index
This book is directed at readers who want to be able to express their thoughts on paper clearly and logically. We first learn to write in the same way as we first learn to speak, by practice and imitation. The human race has been peculiarly successful in handing on the ability to speak. Somehow we succeed in educating the young within the first few years of life to manipulate what is really one of humanity’s most complex techniques. The development happens all around us – from animal squeaks and dribbles to coherent speech in six years of intellectual immaturity. How is it done? Researchers have counted in thousands the number of words that the average child of three or four utters in a day. Clearly constant practice matters, but that practice is solidly based on imitation, not on formal instruction in ‘How to Speak’. We do not introduce our toddlers to grammatical rules or formulations, yet somehow they readily learn that ‘John kicked Jane’ means something different from ‘Jane kicked John’.
The importance of the imitative factor in learning to speak is evident in the different accents, dialects, and indeed degrees of ‘correctness’ that we hear around us. And since learning to write is equally a matter of practice and imitation, it is obvious that what we read will determine how well or badly we write. Good English usage is picked up by infection from what we hear and read. In the same way, however, bad usage is picked up by infection from what we hear and read. In that respect how healthy is the usage climate that we inhabit? Clearly we cannot expect to progress in expressing ourselves effectively on paper if the printed material we pick up day by day abounds in slovenly and inaccurate usage. Yet of recent years much has been revealed about the increasing faultiness in the English usage of such media as the daily press, magazines and the radio. I have myself made more than one attempt to display in print the kind of errors habitually made and to show how they could be best avoided.
Some of those who have paid attention to this problem have spoken as though it were chiefly due to a general ignorance of grammar. While it cannot be denied that grammatical error plays a part in damaging current usage, it has never seemed to me that the remedy for this situation was to be found simply in stuffing more and more grammatical formulations into the heads of either children or adults. One cannot investigate current usage for its defects without discovering that ignorance of grammar is not the gravest deficiency in it. Some of the faultiest sentences we read and hear nowadays are not in the least ungrammatical.
Getting a correct grammatical structure in a sentence is one thing. Using words meaningfully in a sentence is a different thing. The two matters are of course closely related. It would be difficult to think of a sentence which would be unambiguously sound and precise in the message it conveyed and yet which would be grammatically incorrect. But conversely it is easy to construct grammatically correct sentences which are deficient in meaning and offend common sense. There is nothing grammatically wrong with the following sentences: ‘Three and four make five’, ‘Snails often suffer from schizophrenia’, ‘If you drink too much tea, you may explode’.
Unless we recognize what an enormous amount of error in writing is due to careless thinking, we shall probably overestimate the damage caused by neglect of grammatical formulations. In my years in higher education I found that crude grammatical slips formed a small proportion of the total errors in written English. Indeed I sometimes found an unerring instinct for faultless grammar existing alongside a tendency to lose one’s head over simple logical sequences. I remember once setting a test for mature students in which they were asked to improve or correct a series of faulty sentences derived from their own work. One of the sentences ran:
These intelligent and imaginative children are the
result of our
educational reforms.
I was astonished to find that most of the ‘improved’ or ‘corrected’ versions ran: ‘These intelligent and imaginative children are the results of our educational reforms.’ It seemed to me that instruction in formal grammar would not meet the crying need of these students. Grammatically, it seemed, they were keenly on the alert. Their need was simply to learn to think clearly; to ask themselves not ‘Should the word result be singular or plural?’ but ‘What is a result?’ and ‘Can a child, however intelligent or imaginative, be defined as the result of an educational reform?’
It is sound thinking that produces good English; it is unsound thinking that produces incorrect English. And by ‘good English’ we mean wording that clearly and effectively conveys what we want it to convey. People tend to think that ‘good English’ is just one of the options on offer for conveying what they have to convey. Indeed one comes across the assumption that ‘good English’ imposes a rather troublesome demand to do something according to special rules which could be done just as well and much more easily without them. The reasoning is false. You might choose between various options if you had to make a journey to Manchester. You might go by train, by car or even by taxi. The point about these options is that they all deliver the same result. They all get you to Manchester. Faulty English is unlikely to convey exactly the same message as correct English. I have just heard a voice on the radio declaring that applicants for a certain requirement ‘must say where they live and where their postcode is’. Might not an applicant respond to this demand by saying: ‘My postcode is in my diary along with my PIN number’? The question ‘Where is John’s address?’ is not the same question as ‘What is John’s address?’ The same applies to the word ‘postcode’. Clearly the speaker should have said ‘where they live and what their postcode is’.
There were centuries in the history of our own civilization when logic was one of the inescapable disciplines in educational courses. Logic is that branch of study in which there is careful analysis of the patterns of reasoning that we follow when arguing a case. It trains us to be exact in our thinking and precise in our utterance, oral or written. The discipline that we must accept if we are to write well is a discipline that first of all directs our thinking. What are the most basic rules for writing correctly and convincingly? You have to make up your mind in advance what (or who) you are talking about. When you actually start to write you must continue to keep in mind exactly what you are talking about. And you must go on talking about it until the sentence ends, or until you specifically change the subject. Saying what you mean is essentially a matter of keeping a straight course and a clear head. Let us look at something I have read in my daily paper. It is concerned with a recent controversy over the use of the MMR vaccine. The journalist is reporting an outbreak of measles in London, where many of the cases are connected with a cluster in Lambeth, Southwark and Lewisham health authority.
This hotspot of the virus, centred on the White House school
in
Clapham, has continued to spread since it took hold in February.
This sentence is grammatically correct. Moreover, there is not a single word, considered in isolation, that the writer does not properly understand. Yet it perfectly illustrates what is most often wrong with current journalism in the use of our language. For it tells you that ‘this hotspot… has continued to spread since it took hold’. That is what we are told. Apparently a ‘hotspot’ is something that can ‘take hold’ and then ‘spread’. The journalist started to talk about a hot spot and then mentally shifted to talking about the virus without allowing her wording to keep up with her. All that was needed to make the sentence above logical was for the writer to keep in mind the difference between a hotspot and a virus and to recognize when she was talking about the one and when she was talking about the other. ‘The hotspot of the virus was centred on the White House school in Clapham, and the virus has continued to spread since it took hold there in February.’
We are concerned with the spoken as well as the written word. We are as likely to hear sloppy use of English on the radio as to read it in the newspaper. I have just heard an announcer speak of a calamitous terrorist bomb attack on a night club and speculate about what might happen ‘if a similar attack were to recur’. This is a fascinating slip-up. If a second attack occurs that is ‘similar’ to the first, it represents a ‘recurrence’ of the first attack. But if that ‘similar’ attack were to ‘recur’, that would presumably constitute a third such attack. In other words, it is not the ‘similar’ attack that ‘recurs’. What ‘recurs’, that is repeats itself, is the first attack, not a ‘similar’ one.
The radio provides us with notable examples of such loose thinking. I heard a commentator putting the government under pressure on the subject of arms being supplied by UK companies to the Israelis. The government’s claim to have an ‘ethical’ foreign policy was cited. The commentator put on his most outraged, most dialectically powerful voice: ‘Is this a total change in government policy or a recognition of what the real situation is?’ Here indeed, seemingly, was the opportunity to trap someone. But the supposed alternatives are false ones, for clearly a logical reply might be: ‘Both.’ The two are not mutually exclusive. You can perhaps create a moment of dialectical tension by asking ‘Is this a masterpiece or a load of rubbish?’ But you can’t create a moment of dialectical tension by asking ‘Is this a masterpiece or a work of art?’ Yet such false alternatives are regularly put excitedly before us by the BBC news commentators.
We live in a verbally infected environment. It is infected in that simplicity and directness are undervalued. I buy a new electric radio alarm clock. The information about its use is headed ‘Functional Overview’, which apparently means ‘How it Works’. More gravely, our verbal environment is one in which too many of those who address us are not thinking before they speak or write. They have a stock of words and phrases from which material is culled without rational analysis. I recently heard a speaker on a news programme defending a certain plan that had been put into practice. ‘In terms of results, it was effective.’ That was what he said. And the question arises whether any plan could be ‘effective’ except ‘in terms of its results’. When you say that a plan was effective, you mean that it achieved the results intended. But expressions like ‘in terms of’ are part of the stock of available vocabulary supposedly appropriate at any point to fill a space.
This book is partly about not automatically falling back on that stock of available usage, so often unreliable. It is about thinking before you utter. It is about composing your thoughts for rational discourse. There was a time when schools called lessons in writing ‘composition’ lessons. It was a useful word for what it conveyed both of inventing material and of imposing order on it. We use the words ‘compose’ and ‘composition’ widely of artistic products in music and the arts. They were once used more of agreements and compacts. In Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra an attempt is made to patch up an agreement between Octavius Caesar and Mark Antony, the two rival masters of the Roman world. As Antony comes along to negotiate with Caesar, he turns to one of his followers and says: ‘If we compose well here, to Parthia.’ In other words: ‘If we get a satisfactory settlement agreed here, then we shall move into Parthia.’ To ‘compose’ is to make satisfactory terms and come to an agreement. In Macbeth the defeated king of Norway ‘craves composition’, in other words, seeks a peace agreement. Especially interesting, in connection with the work in hand here, are the words with which the Duke of Venice opens the council scene in Othello. Various conflicting reports have been received about threatening movements of the Turkish fleet. ‘There is no composition in these news,’ the Duke complains, which would make the information credible. ‘Composition’ implies consistency and coherence. Anyone concerned for good English usage must be aware that to ‘compose’ well in speech or on paper is to produce a fabric in which the parts fit together harmoniously. This notion of orderliness, as opposed to inner conflict, is basic to ‘composition’ of all kinds. ‘Compose yourself!’ is generally advice to get rid of any disquiet, confusion or turmoil that may be disturbing the system. The word ‘composure’, implying a settled and unruffled attitude, derives from the same Latin word as ‘composition’.
Thus it is that, in the process of correcting faulty English, the expressions which come most frequently to mind are concerned with disorder as opposed to order: ‘This word does not properly balance that one’, ‘This expression does not connect coherently with that one’, ‘This assertion does not follow properly on that one’, ‘You cannot put this word here if that word is there’. It is effective ‘composition’ that produces lucid and meaningful English. And perhaps we shall best understand the character of effective ‘composition’ if we contrast it with what we know of decomposition. It is the difference between a coherently organized organism working meaningfully in all its separate parts and functions and a defunct, decaying mass of squalid remains. How far our civilization and culture, our institutions and social patterns are more generally affected by decomposition is not a matter for discussion here, but the case could be made that the decay of coherence and precision in our use of words is a symptom that ought to be urgently treated on other grounds than mere interest in making oneself clear.
Be that as it may, the immediate aim here is to guide and encourage readers to come to the task of expressing themselves on paper with two firm purposes in mind. The first is mentally to clear the decks of the accumulated verbal detritus deposited there by daily exposure to today’s media. The second is to organize their thoughts for articulation by fixing their eyes on the virtues of directness and clarity. We don’t want what we have to say to be marred by modish cliché or laden with fashionable wordiness. It is to cater for these two aims that we scrutinize defective practices in the verbal environment we inhabit and try to show how we may escape their influence. It is often said that we learn from our mistakes and no doubt that is true of certain activities. So far as the art of writing is concerned, however, there is an awful lot that we can learn from the mistakes of others.
The right word in any context is the word that fits there and pulls its weight there. There are words which usage has rendered almost incapable of pulling any weight at all. They are words which slip into our use by habit, bypassing the proper process of real thinking. They are overused words which you should think twice about when they come to mind as you are writing, or even as you are speaking if the context is a formal one. Frequency of use is not, of course, in itself necessarily damaging to words. You may use the words ‘cup of tea’ several times a day, and the words retain their fitness. You don’t even damage the words if you regularly use them metaphorically, describing a new television programme that attracts your children as ‘not my cup of tea’. The words we are here concerned with are to be handled with especial restraint, not just because they are overused but because they have been overused in a way which has reduced their value. They plant themselves in our minds through force of thoughtless habit. If we actually paused to recall what they are supposed to mean and compare it with what we are making them mean, then we should not utter or write them. We turn first to a distinctive category of words which have already been vandalized, a few of that group of words that is raided day after day, not in order to be used for their proper meaning, but to have that meaning drained away.
Consider how the writer chooses to use the word ‘terrific’ in the following:
Interesting garden forms of meadow cranesbill, Geranium pratenseare terrific and really thrive on dry alkaline soil.
Here the word ‘terrific’ is used simply as a term of vague approval. The dictionary meaning of the word – ‘very great, intense, frightening’ – is ignored. Yet the obvious connection of the word with the words ‘terror’ and ‘terrify’ indicates what a powerful connotation it once had. Does the loose use of it matter? Only in the sense that, overused in this way, the word is not available for effective use when it is really wanted. If you want to convey that there is news of a truly ‘terrific’ disaster, a natural disaster or a calamitous train accident, you cannot convey the magnitude of the event if you have recently been using the word as the gardener used it above. One day you have a ‘terrific’ headache, the next day a ‘terrific’ new summer outfit, then a ‘terrific’ let-down because the price of the item has been halved in the sale. If we can’t avoid this unnecessary recourse to the word in daily chatter, we must at least do so when we write or speak formally.
In the same gardening magazine I read of how some enthusiasts renovated a historic garden under the scrutiny of television viewers:
When we opened the garden to the public, the sun was shining
and the response was just incredible.
And in another magazine I read:
I admit that, as a teenager in the late 70s and early 80s, I was
incredibly impressed with what working-class boys on club doors
could achieve.
In neither case is it appropriate to introduce notions of incredibility. What is ‘incredible’ is beyond belief or understanding. Appropriately applied to accounts of seeming preternatural manifestations the word carries its proper weight. Perhaps the careless misuse of the words ‘incredible’ and ‘incredibly’ is more damaging than the careless misuse of the word ‘terrific’, because when we want to define something in terms of magnitude and terror we have lots of words to go at – ‘vast’, ‘immense’, ‘huge’, ‘massive’, ‘horrifying’ and ‘overwhelming’ for instance – but when we want to describe something as utterly beyond belief we have only the words ‘unbelievable’ and ‘incredible’. And ‘incredible’ has become all but useless because its connotation has been diluted to the point of near meaninglessness.
The fact is that we use lots of words regularly of such a kind and in such a way that if we were asked ‘Did you really mean that?’ we should have to say no. We didn’t really mean that the costume was ‘fantastically’ cheap but the shoes ‘dreadfully’ expensive. We didn’t really mean that the restaurant was ‘beautifully’ clean but the chairs ‘horribly’ uncomfortable. We were just mentally underlining the words ‘cheap’ and ‘expensive’, ‘clean’ and ‘uncomfortable’. The overworked additional words are just devices to intensify the meaning of the words they accompany, virtually putting the words that follow them into italics. It is when we are making statements in the approval mode or the disapproval mode that these intensifiers come fully into their own. It was a ‘beastly’ cold morning, we say. We happened to get up late and we were ‘frantically’ trying to make up for it. But the fridge was almost ‘literally’ empty. Added to which, the postman came ‘impossibly’ late. So we talk, and the intensifying words ‘beastly’, ‘frantically’, ‘literally’ and ‘impossibly’ are all but empty of meaning. We really meant that it was a very cold morning, we overslept and were trying hard to make up for it, the fridge was nearly empty and the postman came very late.
It is perhaps worth making the point that, if we try to be resourceful and original in our use of ‘intensifiers’ we may only add to the damage done to our language. If we say ‘It was a deliriously happy occasion’, using ‘deliriously’ as a mere intensifier, then we hasten the coming of the time when ‘deliriously’ will go the way of ‘frantically’. Journalists, of course, have a vested interest in adding to the list of intensifiers, because a newly adopted intensifier carries imaginative clout and an air of refreshing novelty. So the proliferation of intensifiers is presumably bound to increase. We hear or see someone condemned as ‘infernally intrusive’ or ‘unconscionably demanding’. We find someone praised as ‘staggeringly clever’ or ‘captivatingly beautiful’. Whenever a useful descriptive term is used for purely exaggerative emphasis its connotation is weakened and its progress hastened towards becoming a mere intensifier all but useless for its proper function.
Fashion brings changes in this respect. In one decade the word ‘great’ stamps things with our approval, in another decade the favourite word is ‘fabulous’ and then that gives way to ‘cool’. Yet each usage is kept alive, and not always happily. It may still be acceptable for us to flatter a friend by telling her that she looks ‘great’ in the new outfit she has bought. No hint of magnitude hangs about the usage of ‘great’ there. However, there are contexts in which this appreciative usage of ‘great’ might be inappropriate.
Tesco pharmacies sell a wide range of products at great prices for you
and your family…
A really clear thinker could not put that on paper, knowing that the ambiguity inherent in the word ‘great’ is going to make the claim seem comic. It is safer to advertise as does a restaurant I passed yesterday: ‘Fabulous Fish!’ No one is going to make the mistake of expecting a steak from the Loch Ness Monster.
One might argue that the world of advertising would be duller without such ventures. Similarly our conversation would be intolerably colourless if we scrapped all the words that save us the trouble of peppering our talk with repetitions of ‘very’ and ‘highly’, ‘good’ and ‘bad’, ‘pleasant’ and ‘unpleasant’. However, we are here primarily concerned with the importance of habitually using the right words on paper, and that means establishing a habit, word by word, of meaning what we say.
We turn now to look more specifically at the process of decay that knocks the real stuffing out of words. There are plenty of words now overused in such a way as to drain them of meaning. We can still employ them in some contexts to carry a valid connotation, but increasingly inexact overuse is debilitating them. Some of them are abstract terms with clear connotations in various fields of scholarship and the arts which have long been taken into more common use. In leaving the more rarified contexts for the domain of day-to-day use, they tend to lose connotative clarity. Then indeed, thrown about by publicists and advertisers, such words are gradually emptied of meaning and become mere counters. It may be argued that the words we have described as ‘intensifiers’ do at least perform a function, if it is only that of telling you to read the words that follow them in bold type. But some of these ‘counters’ are being turned into little more than noises in the air or marks on a piece of paper. For our examples let us look at some usages of a group of words now popular with advertisers and journalists. The word ‘concept’ is one.
Our special attraction at the show will be special concept cars of
the 21st century sponsored by the AA.
Since a ‘concept’ is an idea in the abstract, the word has recently been exploited where what is required is the notion of some novel product of the inventive mind. Thus we find a firm advertising ‘the Atkinson’s concept of retaining your kitchen or bedroom carcases and replacing only the facia’.
While the word ‘concept’ is borrowed from psychology, the word ‘theme’ has been borrowed from the world of the arts.
She already had a brass toothbrush holder, so she added to that
theme by buying a toilet roll holder and towel ring in the same
style.
To suggest that a brass toothbrush holder constitutes a ‘theme’ to which additions may be made is to wear away the connotative quality of the word ‘theme’. Those to whom a ‘theme’ is something enunciated at the opening of a symphony or an epic poem, and charged with significance, will sense a cheapening of our linguistic currency.
The interior of the main saloon follows the same design theme
to the earlier ships.
The addition of the word ‘design’ here is interesting because it prepares us for the following advertisement:
Come to our showroom where our helpful staff will be pleased to
assist you with queries, designs or theme concepts.
We have had a ‘design theme’. Now we have ‘theme concepts’. And another firm selling fitments for kitchens and bathrooms claims this for its work:
It’s a total design concept that lets you mix and match to create
an infinite number of possibilities.
It begins to look as though the terms ‘concept’, ‘design’ and ‘theme’ can also be mixed and matched to create an infinite number of possibilities.
The clear thinker will resist the temptation to join in the campaign of verbal vandalism. It is a campaign that picks words up from any speciality of life or thought and squeezes out of them whatever real significance they bear. One of the firms quoted above claims that it ‘redefines the role of the kitchen and dining room’. Serious interpretation of those words would surely convey that there was to be a change from using the kitchen for cooking and the dining room for eating, for such are the roles of those rooms. But what the advertisement really achieves is to redefine the role of utterance, which ought to be to preserve or enrich meaning, not to eradicate it. The word ‘role’, especially useful in the world of drama, has been divested of its rich connotative quality and used seemingly as the equivalent of ‘function’. But only ‘seemingly’. For by no stretch of imagination can it be pretended that refurnishing a kitchen or a dining room with the latest in equipment and furniture is generally undertaken in order to alter the function of either.
It would be neglectful to leave this topic without reverting to the way the advertiser used the word ‘infinite’ above (‘infinite number of possibilities’). This is an exaggerative use of a word whose real meaning is totally disproportionate to what is intended by the writer. We have long used expressions such as ‘I shall be eternally grateful to you’ when we know that we can’t really vouch for our ‘eternal’ destiny. In the same way we have heard people say ‘He is a man of infinite patience’ when what was meant was that he was a very patient man indeed. Exaggeration in such contexts might be excused as an aspect of human courtesy, but it is a rather different matter when one reads of a garden:
It is obvious that this is a garden that gives its owners a great deal
of pleasure. The infinite amount of intimate personal touches
throughout makes it feel well cared for and loved.
If ‘infinite’ is now allowed to slip off the tongue or the pen as a ready substitute for ‘numerous’ or ‘many’, it will be a pity. That development has happened with ‘finite’.
With only a finite amount of each fabric available, orders will be
handled on a first come, first served basis.
It is useful to have the word ‘finite’ as the opposite of ‘infinite’, the notion of what is bounded by space and time with what is not so bounded. The writer who values logical clarity will not throw away a word so useful in order to convey that the supply of a certain curtain material on sale will run out in due course.
When the word ‘finite’ is used to mean ‘limited’ and the word ‘infinite’ to mean ‘numerous’ there is an exaggeration that weakens the words. The more such usages are repeated, the more the proper, tight connotations of the words are dissipated. The process of dissipation is happening around us to many, many words. We have taken part in it whenever we have thoughtlessly repeated the word ‘unique’ to mean remarkable or very effective. It has happened to the word ‘myth’. I have just read:
It is assumed that men who cross-dress must be gay, but this is a
myth.
‘Myth’ is a rich word for those stories of gods and goddesses of the ancient world which somehow comprehend through the substance of their narratives sometimes perceptive, sometimes profound interpretations of the universe and our place within it. It is natural that the characteristics of the invented and the fantastic that these stories have should have left us with the notion that ‘myth’ is one thing and factual history a very different thing. So the mythical gets contrasted with the historical. The word ‘myth’ is loosely bandied about as a convenient way of casting doubt on the truth of some story or related facts. The clear thinker will always say ‘that is false’ rather than ‘that is a myth’, if that is what is really meant.
A similar cheapening of meaning has occurred with the word ‘legendary’. Narratives like the story of Theseus are properly described as ‘legendary’. They belong to ancient legend and have acquired the mystique of venerableness and remoteness. It is natural that the word should have been used when writers were anxious to create an aura of extreme grandeur around some person or event. ‘His generosity was legendary,’ the obituarist writes. It is a pity perhaps that he does. But it is surely not quite as damaging as this advertisement for outdoor clothing.
Durability is legendary and far greater than that of performance fabric derived from the petrochemical industry.
Logically examined, the sentence makes nonsense. ‘Durability is legendary’ is just not true. ‘Its durability is legendary’ is what is meant, and it is crude misuse of a rich word.
Although perhaps advertisers are most prone to this kind of exaggeration, deeply stirred feelings, either of approval or disapproval, send speakers and writers reaching for hyperbole.
Fish were still being dragged from the lower river in obscene numbers…
So an outraged angler writes. ‘Obscene’ is a strong word and it cannot literally be applied to numbers. The angler reaches for a word which will reveal his disgust with what is happening.
We have looked at words so overused that they have already lost their usefulness. We have observed the process by which words have their proper meanings drained away. We turn now to look more closely at some words currently suffering the kind of careless handling that empties them of exactness in their connotation.
An answer is a reply to a question. The word is used strictly thus on examination papers. If there are pressing problems in the air, we now tend to say ‘What’s the answer?’ But this use of the word presupposes a question or a problem in the background. It is lax to use the word ‘answer’ where no such query arises.
There are no right or wrong answers to these issues.
An ‘issue’, in that context, is a matter or topic of concern. It may call for consideration and discussion, but it does not call for an ‘answer’. If the word ‘answers’ is kept, then the word ‘issues’ must go: ‘There are no right and wrong answers to these questions.’ The current fondness for overstretching this word ‘answer’ is well illustrated in this piece from the world of horse-racing:
Nevertheless there was a sizeable entry that resulted in 10 combinations
finding the answers to a technical track, which was raised
considerably for the jump-off.
Whatever physical obstacles and traps impeded the progress of the competitors in this event, it seems unnecessary to describe their successful negotiation as a matter of ‘finding answers’.
The word ‘aspect’ is surely among the most overused words today. It is properly used of an appearance, a distinct feature, or a particular way of considering some issue, and it comes in useful in numerous contexts. There are contexts, however, in which it seems to function to no clear purpose at all. Here is a piece about reviving airships:
The memory of Count von Zeppelin was an important aspect in
restarting this development from a historical point of view.
In this case the word ‘aspect’ seems to have been chosen, not for want of any other word, but for want of a clear meaning in the sentence. Nothing would be lost if the sentence were rewritten so as to remove the word. We might suggest ‘The memory of Count von Zeppelin influenced us in restarting this development’ or even ‘encouraged us to restart this development’. Each of those two versions conveys a meaning, whereas the original wording (‘was an important aspect in’) is evasive of meaning.
An interesting kind of verbal misuse can occur as a result of stretching the connotation of a word on the basis of already established idiomatic practice. That is what has happened to the word ‘background’. We know what a background is, literally speaking. Yet we tend to extend the meaning of the word conversationally when we are told of some struggle arising between people and we ask ‘What is the background to all this?’ We are asking to have events accounted for by explanation of how the struggle arose. We are asking for something like the causes and the history of the situation. That usage of the word ‘background’ is no doubt defensible. But what are we to make of the following? It is concerned with controversy over licensing cruising boats on canals by British Waterways:
The background to this meeting long predated the continuous
cruising license proposals but was to explore problems perceived
by BW to be caused by continuously cruising boats and their
mooring habits.
It would have been satisfactory to describe how the controversy developed after using the words ‘The background to this meeting’, but to say that ‘the background predated’ certain events is to turn the word ‘background’ into the equivalent of some such word as ‘origin’ or ‘cause’. To make matters worse, the ‘background’ is then said to have been ‘to explore’ certain problems. So the background, having first functioned as ‘origin’ now functions as something roughly equivalent to ‘agenda’ or ‘plan’. ‘Background’ has been turned into an all-purpose word devoid of any clarity of definition. The sentence should begin: ‘This meeting was concerned with issues dating back before the continuous cruising licence proposals…’
At the time of crisis after the destruction of the New York skyscrapers by terrorists a BBC announcement told how items such as knives were being taken from passengers boarding planes at UK airports. The action was described as an understandable inconvenience ‘during the present climate’. But a climate is not a stretch of time during which things may or may not occur and the use of the word ‘during’ was out of place. Expressions such as ‘climate of opinion’ and ‘emotional climate’ are useful metaphors and the word ‘climate’ has gradually established itself as a shorthand word for the state of public feeling generally prevalent. However, that usage would scarcely justify the following statement from a local authority reporting on local conditions:
The bad news in recent months has built on a general climate of
decline that has been going on for ten years and more.
To say that bad news has ‘built on a climate’ is to throw words about without respect for connotation. And to speak of a ‘decline’ as ‘going on’ is inelegant to say the least. What is conveyed by the sentence can be said without reference to ‘news’ or ‘climate’. The topic under discussion is unemployment and what we learn is that the situation in that respect is continuing to deteriorate.
A rather surprising popularity seems to have descended upon the word ‘convenience’ as used in the business world. Of course, it carries useful associations of what is readily available and helpful, and therefore gets applied to provisions made for the benefit of customers, but here we have an example of how the word is being misused in a quite different context. The topic is the controversy about allowing women to become members of Lord’ s.
Traditionalists are portrayed as blimps and dinosaurs, but that is
just a cheap convenience.
To most of us a ‘cheap convenience’ would be a public lavatory that made no charge. Here a journalist uses the expression when what he appears to mean is that representing the traditionalists as blimps and dinosaurs is an easy way of discrediting them. It appears that ‘convenience’ is used of something that is ready to hand or easily accessible, and ‘cheap’ of something that is rather unworthy. So why not say ‘but that is a ready-made jibe’?
The verb to ‘deliver’ is now scattered over statements from the business world. It was once a word with a much more restricted use than it has now. Time was when postmen delivered the mail and doctors or midwives delivered new-born babies. Yet now I read:
Of course the LTA should ensure that tennis reaches as wide a
base as possible and schools must be the focus for delivering
initiatives.
Need ‘initiatives’ acquire the status of junk mail? What is wrong with just ‘taking’ initiatives or even ‘inspiring’ them? The truth is that a remarkable variety of items is now being ‘delivered’ regularly in the press.
We believe there is a powerful argument to suggest that a single
management focus on delivering safety and quality will produce
better results than a diverse matrix of integrated contracts.
This is a statement from the transport industry.To the mind of some one sensitive to words, concern with ‘safety’ and ‘quality’ is certainly something to be looked after by a transport system, but the transport industry’s business is not a matter of delivering abstractions. It is passengers and freight that have to be efficiently delivered to their destinations. Yet from the same industry we take the following:
I sense that passengers and London’s businesses want us to deliver
improvements sooner rather than later.
Why does making bus and train services better have to become a matter of ‘delivering improvements’. In simple English ‘improvements’ are things that you ‘make’. It is goods that you ‘deliver’. Yet the sentence above was followed shortly after by this:
Richard Bowker promised to focus on two areas: first, to restore
stability and confidence allowing the railway to deliver the basics
every day and, second, to design and implement the vision for
the railway the country wanted.
We have already heard of the railway ‘delivering’ safety, quality and improvements. Now it is going to ‘deliver’ basics and every day of the week. That, along with designing and implementing a ‘vision’, seems to constitute the system’s modus operandi.
In the business world there seems to be a now well-established stylized verbal menu that supplies items for filling up space on paper. The word ‘focused’ is one of them. This comes from the railway industry:
He put engineering centre stage. He called for clear, competent,
focused leadership. SRA would, he insisted, be pro-active, energetic,
an asker of tough questions and a maker of tough decisions.
Does the word ‘focused’ add anything here? One asks because it is one of the terms now sprinkled over business statements with the seeming desire to make them all sound the same. What would be the use of ‘unfocused’ leadership? Can any practical task be achieved without focus upon it? And what is the force here of the word ‘proactive’? All business leaders should be ready to take initiatives and the word ‘proactive’ cannot convey anything other than that readiness.The tendency in the business world to pick up a watering-can-type container overflowing with such expressions and to douse printed statements from this fount of overdone clichés is wholly unbusinesslike.
It is happening to the word ‘functional’. Something that is ‘functional’ is something that performs a function, in other words, that works. So to read of the planning of a garden that ‘the scheme should be functional’ says no more than that the scheme will come off and the garden will be able to be treated as a garden. Surely that ought not to need saying of any scheme or plan. And consider the following from an account of protective clothing for anglers:
The hood volume can be adjusted by means of a simple, but
functional, exterior tape-and-buckle arrangement…
The writer is recommending the garment. To remind the reader that the device for adjusting the hood actually works ought surely to be superfluous. A non-functional adjustment system would represent a contradiction in terms.
A now rapidly decaying word is the verb to ‘identify’. My dictionary tells me of its use in speaking of proving or recognizing the identity of a person or thing, or of recognizing equivalence between items. But we find a usage far removed from that in sentences such as the following:
The Chief Constable of Northamptonshire makes a number of
points with which many people working in the criminal justice
system will identify.
This current tendency to use the word ‘identify’ as the equivalent of ‘sympathize’ is surely lax and insensitive. There is no logical justification for this usage. No human being should be asked to ‘identify’ with a list of points, however valid. The sentence should end ‘with which many people working in the criminal justice system will sympathize’.
In any short list of the most overused words in business today ‘implement’ would have to take its place alongside ‘deliver’ and ‘focus’. We have already heard (under ‘deliver’) of the railway management’s pledge, not only to deliver daily basics, but also to ‘design and implement the vision’ the country is crying out for. There is more in the same vein:
Railway Safety is determined that any lessons learned from
such incidents are quickly implemented for the benefit of the
travelling public.
We intend to maintain this cooperation with partner organizations
to implement the actions identified in the Wye Salmon
Action Plan.