Plain Words (11 page)

Here we come to the most important part of our subject. Correctness is not enough. The words used may all be words approved by the dictionary and used in their right senses; the grammar may be faultless and the idiom above reproach. Yet what is written may still fail to convey a ready and precise meaning to the reader. That it does fail on these grounds is the charge brought against much of what is written nowadays, including much of what is written by officials. In the first chapter I quoted a saying of Matthew Arnold, that the secret of style is to have something to say and to say it as clearly as you can. The basic fault of much present-day writing is that it seems to say what it has to say in as complicated a way as possible. Instead of being terse and direct, it is stilted, long-winded and circumlocutory. Instead of choosing the simple word it prefers the unusual. Instead of the plain phrase, it resorts to cliché.

This sort of writing has been called ‘barnacular',
*
and the American word for it is ‘gobbledygook'. Its nature can be studied not only in the original but also in translation. George Orwell, in his essay ‘Politics and the English Language', took the passage in Ecclesiastes about the race not being to the swift nor the battle to the strong,
†
and put it into ‘modern English': ‘success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity'. It may be significant that many critics have found their greatest contrasts with barnacular writing in the Bible or Prayer Book. English style over the years must have been immeasurably influenced by everyone's intimate knowledge of these two books, whose cadences were heard every day at family prayers and every Sunday at matins and evensong. Now family prayers are said no longer, and few go to church.

The forms that gobbledygook commonly takes in official writing will be examined in the following three chapters. In this one we are concerned (if I may borrow a bit of jargon from the doctors) with the aetiology of the disease, and with prescribing some general regimen to help avoid catching it.

Why do so many writers spurn simplicity? Officials are far from being the only offenders. It seems to be a morbid condition contracted in early adulthood. Children show no sign of it. Here, for example, is the response of a child of ten to an invitation to write an essay on a bird and a beast:

The bird that I am going to write about is the owl. The owl cannot see at all by day and at night is as blind as a bat.

I do not know much about the owl, so I will go on to the beast which I am going to choose. It is the cow. The cow is a mammal. It has six sides—right, left, an upper and below. At the back it has a tail on which hangs a brush. With this it sends the flies away so that they do not fall into the milk. The head is for the purpose of growing horns and so that the mouth can be somewhere. The horns are to butt with, and the mouth is to moo with. Under the cow hangs the milk. It is arranged for milking. When people milk, the milk comes and there is never an end to the supply. How the cow does it I have not yet realised, but it makes more and more. The cow has a fine sense of smell; one can smell it far away. This is the reason for the fresh air in the country.

The man cow is called an ox. It is not a mammal. The cow does not eat much, but what it eats it eats twice, so that it gets enough. When it is hungry it moos, and when it says nothing it is because its inside is all full up with grass.

The child who wrote this had something to say and said it as clearly as possible, and so unconsciously achieved style.
*
But why do we write, when we are ten, ‘so that the mouth can be somewhere', and perhaps when we are thirty, ‘in order to ensure that the mouth may be appropriately positioned environmentally'? What songs do the sirens sing to lure a writer on to barnacular rocks? This question, though puzzling, is not beyond all conjecture. I will hazard one or two.

The first affects only the official. It is tempting to cling too long to outworn words and phrases. The British Constitution, as everyone knows, has been shaped by retaining old forms and putting them to new uses. Among the old forms that we are reluctant to abandon are those found in State documents. Every Bill begins with the words: ‘Be it enacted by the Queen's Most Excellent Majesty, by and with the advice and consent of the Lords Spiritual and Temporal, and Commons, in this present Parliament assembled, and by the authority of the same, as follows…'. It ends its career as a Bill and becomes an Act when the Clerk of the Parliaments is authorised by the Queen to declare ‘La Reine le veult'. That is all very well, because no one ever reads these traditional phrases; they are no longer intended to convey thought from one brain to another. And none of us would much like the official to say, ‘That's OK by Her Majesty'. But officials, living in this atmosphere, and properly proud of the ancient traditions of their service, sometimes allow their own style of writing to be affected by it—
adverting
and
acquainting
and
causing to be informed of same
. There may even be produced in the minds of some officials the feeling that a common word lacks the dignity that they are bound to maintain.

That, I think, is one song the sirens sing to the official. Another they certainly sing to us all. Wells's Mr Polly, from a love of striking phrases, speaks of ‘sesquippledan verboojuice', and there is something of Mr Polly in most of us, especially when young. But any person of sensibility may be tempted by rippling or reverberating polysyllables.
Evacuated to alternative accommodation
seems to give a satisfaction that cannot be got from
taken to another house
;
ablution facilities
strikes a chord that does not vibrate to
wash basins
. Far-fetched words are by definition ‘recherché'. They are thought to give distinction, and so examples like
implement
,
optimum
and
global
acquire their vogue. A newly discovered metaphor shines like a jewel in a drab vocabulary:
blueprint
,
bottleneck
,
ceiling
and
target
are eagerly seized, and the dust settles on their discarded predecessors—
plan
,
hold up
,
limit
and
objective
.
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But it will not do. Official writing is essentially of the sort of which Manilius said: ‘Ornari res ipsa negat contenta doceri'—the very subject matter rules out ornament; it asks only to be put across.

Another song I am sure the sirens have in their repertoire is a call to the instinct for self-preservation. It is sometimes dangerous to be precise. Newman, in a severe passage from his
Apologia Pro Vita Sua
, characterises ‘Church-of-Englandism' as a state of being in thrall to the idea that ‘mistiness is the mother of wisdom'. A figure whom he calls ‘your safe man and the hope of the Church' is required to guide the Church through ‘the channel of no-meaning, between the Scylla and Charybdis of Aye and No'. If so, ecclesiastics are not in this respect unique. Politicians have long known the danger of precise statements, especially at election time. An astute American senator, asked to explain a declaration that ‘Americanism' was to be the year's campaign issue, is said to have replied that he did not know what it meant, but that it was going to be ‘a damn good word with which to carry an election'. Disraeli made the same point in his novel of 1844,
Coningsby
:

‘And now for our cry!' said Mr Taper.

‘It is not a Cabinet for a good cry,' said Tadpole; ‘but then, on the other hand, it is a Cabinet that will sow dissension in the opposite ranks, and prevent them having a good cry.'

‘
Ancient
institutions and
modern
improvements, I suppose, Mr Tadpole?'

‘Ameliorations is the better word; ameliorations. Nobody knows exactly what it means.'

When an official does not know a minister's mind, when perhaps the minister does not know it either, or when the minister thinks it wiser not to speak too plainly, the official's own utterances will sometimes necessarily be covered with a mist of vagueness. Civil Service methods are often contrasted unfavourably with those of business. But to make this comparison is to forget that no board of directors of a business concern have to meet a committee of their shareholders every afternoon, to submit themselves daily to an hour's questioning on their conduct of the business, to get the consent of that committee by a laborious process to every important step they take, or to conduct their affairs with the constant knowledge that there is a shadow board eager for the shareholders' authority to take their place. The systems are quite different and are bound to produce different methods. Ministers are under daily attack, and their reputations are largely in the hands of their staffs. Only civil servants who have full and explicit authority from their ministers can show in important matters that prompt boldness that is said to be businesslike.

The following extract is from a letter written by a government department to its Advisory Council:

In transmitting this matter to the Council the Minister feels that it may be of assistance to them to learn that, as at present advised, he is inclined to the view that, in the existing circumstances, there is,
prima facie
, a case for …

The extract was sent by a correspondent to
The Times
for ridicule, but provoked a more judicious response:

even though mathematical accuracy may in the nature of things be unattainable, identifiable inaccuracy must at least be avoided. The hackneyed official phrase, the wide circumlocution, the vague promise, the implied qualification are comfortingly to hand. Only those who have been exposed to the temptation to use them know
how hard it is to resist. But with all the sympathy that such understanding may mean, it is still possible to hold that something might be done to purge official style and caution, necessary and desirable in themselves, of their worst extravagances.

It is as easy to slip into extravagant caution as it is to see the absurdity of it when pointed out. One may surmise that the writer of the original letter wanted the Advisory Council to advise the Minister in a certain way, but did not want them to think that the Minister's mind was already made up before getting their advice. The writer might have achieved these ends without piling qualification on qualification and reservation on reservation. All that was needed here was to say that the Minister thought so-and-so but wanted to know what the Advisory Council thought before taking a decision.

This example illustrates another trap into which official writing is led when it has to leave itself a bolt-hole, as it so often must. Cautionary clichés are used automatically, without thought of what they mean. There are two of them here:
inclined to think
and
as at present advised
. Being
inclined to think
, in the sense of inclining to an opinion not yet crystallised, is a reasonable enough expression, just as one might say colloquially ‘my mind is moving that way'. But excessive use of the phrase may provoke the captious critic to say that if being inclined to think is really something different from thinking, then the less said about it the better until it has ripened into something that can properly be called thought.
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We can hardly suppose that the writer of the following thought really needed time to be sure of not being mistaken:

We are inclined to think that people are more irritated by noise that they feel to be unnecessary than by noise that they cause themselves.

As at present advised
should be used only where an opinion has been formed on expert (e.g. legal) advice, never, as it is much too often, as the equivalent of saying: ‘This is what the Minister thinks at present, but since the Minister is human, tomorrow all may change'. That may be taken for granted.

There is often a real need for caution, and it can tempt a writer into hedging and obscurity. But it is no excuse for either. A frank admission that an answer cannot be given is better than an answer that tries to look as if it meant something, but really means nothing. Such a reply exasperates the reader and brings the Civil Service into discredit.

Politeness plays its part too: obscurity is less likely to give offence. Politeness often shows itself in euphemism, a term defined by the dictionary as ‘the substitution of a mild or vague expression for a harsh or blunt one'. It is prompted by an impulse akin to the one that led the Greeks to call the Black Sea the
Euxine
(the hospitable one) in the hope of averting its notorious inhospitableness, and the Furies the
Eumenides
(the good-humoured ladies) in the hope that they might be flattered into being less furious. For the Greeks it was the gods and the forces of nature that had to be propitiated. For those who govern us today it is the electorate. Hence the prevalence of what grammarians call
meiosis
(understatement), the use of qualifying adverbs such as
somewhat
and
rather
, and the popularity of the ‘not un-' device. This last is useful in its place. There are occasions when a writer's meaning may be conveyed more exactly by (say)
not unkindly
,
not unnaturally
or
not unjustifiably
,
than by
kindly
,
naturally
or
justifiably
. But the ‘not un-' habit is liable to take charge, with disastrous effects, making the victim forget all straightforward adjectives and adverbs. When an Inspector of Taxes writes ‘This is a by no means uncomplicated case', we may be pretty sure that it is an example of meiosis. And, ‘I think the officer's attitude was not unduly unreasonable' seems a chicken-hearted defence of a subordinate. George Orwell recommended that we should all inoculate ourselves against the disease by memorising this sentence: ‘A not unblack dog was chasing a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field'.