Plain Words (21 page)

Note
. The workload of
issue
has grown enormously since Gowers wrote this, not least because it now also doubles up on the job hitherto done by
problem
. Thus a government department these days might release a disastrous consultation paper in terms of issues to do with interoperability issues, even as a Minister has personal issues that threaten to become an issue in the press, causing the Prime Minister to have a major issue with the Min
ister. In short, Gowers's warning went unheeded, and
issue
is being made to labour harder than ever. ~

Overall

The favour that this word has won over the past few years is astonishing. It is an egregious example of the process I described as boring out a weapon of precision into a blunderbuss. Indeed the word seems to have a quality that impels people to use it in settings in which it has no meaning at all.

Examples of its meaningless use are:

The overall growth of London should be restrained.

Radical changes will be necessary in the general scheme of Exchequer grants in aid of local authorities, therefore, to secure that overall the policy of the Government in concentrating those grants as far as possible where the need is greatest is further developed. (Here
overall
is an adverb.)

The Controller should assume a general overall responsibility for the efficient planning of all measures.

When
overall
is not meaningless, it is commonly used as a synonym for some more precise word, especially
aggregate
,
average
and
total
, but also
supreme
,
overriding
,
comprehensive
,
absolute
and others.

For
aggregate
:

Compared with the same week a year ago, overall production of coal showed an increase of more than 100,000 tons. (i.e. ‘deep-mined plus opencast'.)

For
average
:

The houses here are built to an overall density of three to the acre.

For
total
:

I have made a note of the overall demand of this company for the next year.

For
supreme
:

Vice-Admiral Duncan, of the United States Navy, was in overall command.

For
overriding
:

They came forward as witnesses because of the overall fear of being involved in a capital charge.

For
comprehensive
:

An overall plan for North Atlantic Defence measures was approved yesterday by the Defence Minister at the Hague.

For
bird's-eye
:

Our observer will be in the control tower, where he will have an overall view of the aerodrome.

For
absolute
:

The Conservatives will have an overall majority in the new Parliament.

For
on balance
:

The purpose of the plan is to enable a larger initial payment to be made and correspondingly lower payments subsequently, entailing an overall saving to the customer. (… leading on balance to a saving for the customer.)

Overall
is also used to mean
altogether
,
whole
,
on the whole
,
generally
,
complete
. According to the dictionaries, it means ‘including everything between the extreme points', as one speaks of the overall length of a ship. For this purpose it is useful, but it is high time that its excursions into the fields of other words were checked. So pervasive is the word now that it is a pleas
ant surprise to come across an old-fashioned
general
in such sentences as:

These reports may be used for obtaining a general picture of the efficiency of a given industry.

Although Europe's general deficit with the outside world fell by over $2 billion during 1949, its deficit with the United States fell hardly at all.

Most writers today would say ‘overall picture' and ‘overall deficit' almost automatically.

Percentage, Proportion, Fraction

Do not use the expression
a percentage
or
a proportion
when what you mean is
some
, as in:

This drug has proved of much value in a percentage of cases.

The London Branch of the National Association of Fire Officers, which includes a proportion of station officers …

Here
percentage
and
proportion
pretend to mean something more than
some
, but do not really do so. They fail to give the reader any idea of the number or proportion of successful cases, or of station officers. One per cent is just as much ‘a percentage' as 99 per cent. So for that matter is 200 per cent.

Do not forget the simple words
many
,
few
and
some
: use
percentage
or
proportion
only if you want to express not an absolute number but the relation of one number to another, and can give at least an approximate degree of exactitude. Though you may not be able to put an actual figure on the percentage or proportion, you can at any rate say ‘a high percentage', ‘a large proportion', ‘a low percentage', ‘a small proportion'.

But
fraction
is different. It has become so common to use ‘only a fraction' in the sense of ‘only a small fraction' that it would be
pedantry to object that 999/1000 is as much a fraction as 1/1000, just as it would certainly be to point out to anyone who says ‘He has got a temperature' that 98 degrees is just as much ‘a temperature' as 104.

Realistic

This word is becoming dangerously popular. What is realistic is what the writer thinks sensible.
Realistic
is ousting words like
practical
,
feasible
,
sensible
itself, and
workmanlike
. Everything nowadays seems to be either ‘academic' or ‘realistic'.

Target

Of all the metaphors that have been called on to help in restoring our balance of trade,
target
has been the most in demand. We are urged not only to reach and attain our targets, but also to fight for them, to achieve them and obtain them. We must not be lulled by a near target. It is discouraging to be a long way short of our target and (what seems to amount to the same thing) to be a long way behind it, but it is splendid to be a long way beyond it. ‘Target in danger' means that it is in no danger of being hit, and ‘target in sight' is intended to be exceptionally encouraging to those who are trying to hit it. In fact targets have got completely out of control. We must regard the life of this metaphor as having been as short as it certainly has been merry, and treat it as dead, driven into an early grave by overwork. Then we can all do anything we like to a target without giving offence to anyone. But readers ought not to be tried too hard. Not even the exigencies of newspaper language can excuse the headline ‘Export Target Hit' to introduce the news that, owing to a dock strike, the export target is unlikely to be hit.

Note
. Gowers's metaphorical shoulders would no doubt have sagged even further had he known that for ‘minimum standards' the Department for Education would one day substitute ‘floor
targets', with much trumpeting of ‘rising floor targets' (see ‘
Ceiling
' above).

Some institutions have now succumbed instead to ‘goal-directed motivational systems', but
targets
remain hugely popular, and have even reached the point of striking back—or so the
Guardian
reports, saying of a new set of exam standards: ‘targets will hit disadvantaged'. ~

We must now return to what I called in
Chapter IV
‘correctness', and consider what it means not in the choice of words but in handling them when chosen. That takes us into the realm of grammar and syntax, as well as of idiom—three words that overlap and are often used loosely, with grammar as a generic term covering them all.

Grammar has fallen from the high esteem that it used to enjoy. In 1818, in his work
A Grammar of the English Language
, William Cobbett wrote that ‘Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express'. The very name of grammar school serves to remind us that grammar was long regarded as the only path to culture and
learning. But that was Latin grammar. When our mother tongue encroached on the paramountcy of the dead languages, questions began to be asked. Even at the time when Cobbett was writing his grammar, Sydney Smith, one of the founders of the
Edinburgh Review
, was fulminating about the unfortunate boy who was ‘suffocated with the nonsense of grammarians, overwhelmed with every species of difficulty disproportionate to his age, and driven by despair to peg, top, or marbles'.

Very slowly over the years since, the idea has been established that the grammar of a living language, which is changing all the time, cannot be fitted into the rigid framework of a dead one. Nor can the grammar of a language such as Latin, which changes the forms of its words to express different grammatical relations, be profitably applied to a language such as English, which has got rid of most of its inflections, and expresses grammatical relations by devices like prepositions and auxiliary verbs, and by the order of its words. The Board of Education itself declared in 1910: ‘There is no such thing as English grammar in the sense which used to be attached to the term'.

In 1912, George Saintsbury, the classicist and critic, denounced the futility of trying to ‘draw up rules and conventions for a language which is almost wholly exception and idiom'. Jespersen preached that the grammar of a language must be deduced from a study of how good writers of it in fact write, not how grammarians say it ought to be written. George Orwell, in ‘Politics and the English Language', went so far as to say that correct grammar and syntax ‘are of no importance so long as one makes one's meaning clear'. And in 1951, in his book
Grammar Without Tears
, Hugh Sykes Davies—after surveying the development of our language from the clumsy and tortuous synthetic beginnings of its Gothic origins to the grace and flexibility of its present analytical structure—showed how, in this great and beneficent reform, the hero is what he calls the ‘lowly man', and the villain, the
grammarian, who constantly tried to hamper the freedom of the lowly man to go his own way. Mr Sykes Davies, surrealist, Communist and university lecturer in English at Cambridge, has advocated a ‘grammatical moratorium' in which we may all be free to disregard the rules of grammar and continue the good work.

The old-fashioned grammarian certainly has much to answer for, having created a false sense of values that still lingers. I have ample evidence in my own correspondence that too much importance is attached to the fetishes of grammarians even now, and too little to choosing the right words. But we cannot have grammar jettisoned altogether; that would mean chaos. There are certain grammatical conventions that are, so to speak, a code of good manners. They change, but those current at the time must be observed by writers who wish to express themselves clearly and without offence to their readers. Mr Sykes Davies himself says that his ‘grammatical moratorium' must be preceded by some instruction in the principles of language ‘which will not shy from the inescapable necessity of starting from nowhere else than the position we stand in at the moment, conditioned by the past'.

In this
chapter I
shall concern myself with some common troubles in the handling of words on which I have noticed guidance to be needed. After an opening section on the arrangement of words, these troubles will be classified under those with Conjunctions (
p. 176
), Negatives (
p. 184
), Number (
p. 189
), Prepositions (
p. 196
), Pronouns (
p. 201
), and Verbs (
p. 222
).

Of these three—grammar, syntax and idiom—it is syntax, in its strict sense of ‘orderly arrangement', that is of the greatest practical importance. The quotation that heads this chapter says that ‘proper words in proper places' makes the true definition of a style. But something more than ‘style' depends on putting words
in their proper places. In a language like ours, which, except in some of its pronouns, has got rid of its different forms for the subjective and objective cases, your very meaning may depend on your arrangement of words.

In Latin, the subject of the verb will have a form that shows it is ‘in the nominative', and the object one that shows it is ‘in the accusative'. You may arrange them as you like, and the meaning will remain the same. But English is different. In the two sentences ‘Cain killed Abel' and ‘Abel killed Cain' the words are the same, but when they are reversed the meaning is reversed too.

If all you want to say is a simple thing like that, there is no difficulty. But you rarely do. You probably want to write a more complicated sentence describing not only the central event but also its how, why and where. The Americans have popularised a useful word,
modifier
, as a label for ‘words or groups of words that restrict, limit or make more exact the meaning of other words'. The ‘modifiers' bring all the trouble.

The rule is easy enough to state. As was said in 1795 by the American grammarian Lindley Murray, in the construction of sentences ‘the words or members, most nearly related, should be placed as near to each other as possible, so as to make their mutual relation clearly appear'. But this rule is not so easy to keep. We do not always remember that what is clear to us may be far from clear to our readers. Sometimes it is not clear even to us which ‘words or members' are ‘most nearly related'. And if there are many ‘modifiers' we may be confronted with difficulties of the jigsaw kind.

The simplest type of faulty arrangement, and the easiest to fall into, is illustrated by the following examples. Their offence is that they obscure the writer's meaning, albeit only momentarily, and suggest a sense that is absurd:

There was a discussion yesterday on the worrying of sheep by dogs in the Minister's room.

The official statement on the marriage of German prisoners with girls made in the House of Commons …

It is doubtful whether this small gas company would wish to accept responsibility for supplying this large area with all its difficulties.

… the hotel lobby door opened and a young woman carrying a baby and her husband entered.

(Quoted by the
New Yorker
from a novel.)

Care should always be taken to avoid the ‘false scent' that comes from grouping words in a way that suggests a different construction from the one intended, however fleeting that suggestion may be:

Behind each part of the story I shall tell lies an untold and often unsuspected story of hard work …

The words ‘I shall tell lies' irresistibly group themselves together until the eye has passed on.
*

Faulty and misleading arrangement is not unknown even in model regulations issued by government departments to show local authorities how things ought to be done:

No child shall be employed on any weekday when school is not open for a longer period than four hours.

‘For a longer period than four hours' qualifies
employed
, not
open
, and should therefore come immediately after
employed
. And in departmental regulations themselves:

Every woman by whom … a claim for maternity benefit is made shall furnish evidence that she has been, or that it is to be expected she will be, confined by means of a certificate given in accordance with the rules …

It is not surprising that a department that sets such an example should receive a letter like this:

In accordance with your instructions I have given birth to twins in the enclosed envelope.

I shall have something more to say on this subject in pointing out the danger of supposing that disorderly sentences can be set right by vagrant commas.
*
But one cause of the separation of ‘words or members most nearly related' is so common that, although I have already touched on it,
†
an examination of some more examples may be useful. That is the separation of the subject from the verb by intervening clauses, usually defining the subject:

Officers appointed to permanent commissions who do not possess the qualifications for voluntary insurance explained in the preceding paragraphs and officers appointed to emergency commissions direct from civil life who were not already insured at the date of appointment (and who, as explained in para. 3, are therefore not required to be insured during service) may be eligible …

The cases where a change in the circumstances affecting the fire prevention arrangements at the premises is such that, if the number of hours stated on the certificate were recalculated, there would be a reduction (or an increase) in the number of hours of fireguard duty which the members concerned would be liable to perform for the local authority in whose area they reside, stand, however, in an entirely different position.

In these examples the reader is kept waiting an unconscionable time for the verb. The simplest way of correcting this will generally be to change the order of the words, or to convert relative clauses into conditional, or both. For instance:

Officers appointed to permanent commissions may be eligible though they do not possess the qualifications for voluntary insurance explained in the preceding paragraph. So may officers appointed to emergency commissions direct from civil life who … etc.

The circumstances affecting the fire prevention arrangements at the premises may, however, so change that, if the number of hours stated in the certificate were recalculated, there would be a reduction, or an increase, in the number of hours of fireguard duty which the members concerned would be liable to perform for the local authority in whose area they reside. These cases stand in an entirely different position.

Sometimes the object allows itself to be driven a confusing distance from the verb. Poets can plead the exigencies of rhyme for separating the two, and say, as C. S. Calverley did in ‘Evening':

O be careful that thou changest,

   On returning home, thy boots.

But officials have no such excuse. They must invert the order and say ‘It is of paramount importance'—for that may be the expression they will be tempted to use—‘that young ladies after standing in wet grass should change their boots on returning home'.

In the following example the writer has lumbered ponderously along without looking ahead, and arrives at the object with a bump:

One or two of the largest Local Authorities are at present employing on their staff as certifying officers and as advisers to the Mental Deficiency Act Committees officers having special qualifications or experience in mental deficiency.

By making the effort to turn the sentence round, the writer could have saved the reader some trouble:

Officers having special qualification or experience in mental deficiency are at present being employed on the staff of one or two of the largest Local Authorities as certifying officers and as advisers to the Mental Deficiency Act Committees.

Two other common errors of arrangement that are likely to give unnecessary trouble, and may actually bewilder the reader, are letting the relative get a long way from its antecedent, and letting the auxiliary get a long way from the main verb. Here, a relative,
which
, is separated from its antecedent:

Enquiries are received from time to time in connection with requests for the grant of leave of absence to school children during term time for various reasons, which can give difficulty to those who must decide.