Politicians, journalists and even
letter-writers have three sorts of raw material: words, facts and ideas. Ideas must include rumours, prejudices, emotions and beliefs., but it is words that journalists and politicians are employed to provide. Even managers
have to use words to convey to other people their ideas and instructions. Words should be the study of us all, even of doctors when they publish their triumphs. Let's see how some professionals use them. The following
inspiring prose sequence quoted in the British Medical Journal comes from the newly aggrandised management of the National Health Service of the U.K., and concerns the treatment of sick children.
"The mediation of
interpersonal expectancies in the helper-helpee professions has to be visualised in the context of a shared understanding of user empowerment. The a priori decision making process will be facilitated by an integrated approach using
an optimum skill mix, and uniform guidelines will help to underpin and complement the process of change. There must be a perceived need to develop finely tuned coping skills within a problem solving and goal setting framework and a
supportive environment. By a layered approach ongoing in-depth strategies will be developed utilising a meaningful protocol of interactive and proactive progressive modules in which the subjects will be taught didactically and
analysed from the colloborative viewpoint." And so on and so on. And if you have got as far as this I congratulate you on your persistence. You will have understood why N.H.S. doctors are complaining about management.
So
hereby, with ignominy and without compensation, I sack and dismiss the writer of such pompous, pretentious, preposterous prose, who, I strongly suspect, much admires himself and his style.
Fowler's "Modern English
Usage" was intended for U.K. civil servants in the hope of improving their writing. Fowler urged them to be direct, simple, brief, vigorous and lucid. This advice he enshrined in five rules, to which I have dared
humbly to add a sixth.
Prefer the familiar word to the far-fetched.
Prefer the concrete word to the abstract.
Prefer the single word to the circumlocution.
Prefer the short word to the long.
Prefer the Saxon word to the Roman.
Prefer the active tense to the passive.
Fowler gives an example (contrary to his own rules, he calls it an illustration)." In the contemplated eventuality is at once the far-fetched, the abstract, the periphrastic, the long and the Roman for
if so." So, may I suggest, Mr. Fowler, is periphrastic and in your own rules is circumlocution. How about replacing both with roundabout?
His fifth rule has been criticised. I find it a useful
guide, but I do feel that aristocratic Roman words, however long , if they are just the right words for the jobs may very occasionally be allowed to glitter among the Saxon peasantry.
That distinguished journal, the British
Medical, is surprisingly blind to its own faults, for it prints articles of such tedium, prolixity, pomposity and passivity that nobody but a fool or an intending critic would actually read them. Wise doctors content themselves
with the summaries.
"The Complete Plain Words" by Gowers, revised by Frazer, is another very useful guide, though in need of a revision for the next century. If Gowers had had the ill luck to read my
quotation from the N.H.S. he would have sent them his book, marked at page 20.
"Some writers ....think that if they can drag in plenty of long... or modish words, arranged in long and involved sentences their
readers will regard them as clever fellows and be stunned into acquiescence. Not so: most readers will be more likely to think ' This man is a pompous ass. I'm not going to agree with him if I can help it'."
U.K. Post
Offices used all to display a notice which was splendidly concise " Postmasters are neither bound to give change nor authorised to demand it."
Ancient Egyptian politicians were just as brief.
Here's a letter from a Minister of Finance to a senior civil servant: "Appolonius to Zeno, greeting. You did right to send the chickpeas to Memphis. Farewell."
Gowers, speaking about verbs, ends an elegant
sentence with just the right Roman word."The verbs loan , gift and author were verbs centuries ago and are now trying to come back again after a long holiday, spent by loan in America, by gift
in Scotland and by author in oblivion. In contrast, George Orwell in "1984" foresees the Newspeak Saxon-based language imposed by a tyrannical government, in which very bad has become doubleplusungood.
Orwell much disliked the not un habit, as in not unjustifiably or not uncomplicated. He suggested writers should inoculate themselves against it by memorising this sentence: the not unblack dog was chasing the
not unsmall rabbit across the not ungreen field.
I like Gower's defence of that long and Mediterranean word ideology. "
Now that people no longer care enough about religion to fight, massacre and enslave one another to secure the form of its observance, we need a word for what has taken its place as an excitant of those forms of human activity, and I know of none better."
Can you accept that dwarves have become vertically challenged, that a deficit has turned into a borrowing requirement , that we can no longer describe a cheerful fellow as gay or an eccentric one as queer? I can bear those
better than I can stand that N.H.S. quotation.
Let me recommend to all teachers of English and to all politicians and journalists that they should not only read but possess "The Complete Plain Words" .
I end my
literary sermon with some verse from "Little Gidding" in which T.S.Eliot gives his views on a well-made sentence:.
...where every word is at home,
Taking its place to support the others,
The word neither diffident nor ostentatious,
An easy commerce of the old and the new,
The common word exact without vulgarity,
The formal word precise but not pedantic,
The complete consort dancing together.
Perhaps you can write like that.
P.S. to
M.G.: a reader phoned about the little biography in italics at the end of my articles. He pointed out, correctly, that before Independence we were all members of the British Empire. I am in honour bound to point out
that I am now a Commander of the ORDER of the British Empire, a C.B.E., sometimes translated as a Cold Boiled Egg.
