Plain Words (7 page)

But these words are mere skirmishers. The main body of the invasions consists of verbs ending in
ise
. Among those now nosing their way into the language are
civilianise
(replace military staff by civil),
editorialise
(make editorial comments on),
finalise
(finally settle),
hospitalise
(send to hospital), and
publicise
(give publicity to). The reason for inventing them seems to be to enable us to say in one word what would otherwise need several. Whether that will prove a valid passport time alone can show. If the words I have listed were all, they might be swallowed, though with wry faces. But they are by no means all. A glut of this diet is being offered to us (
trialise
,
itinerise
,
casualise
and
reliableise
are among the specimens sent to me), and they continue to come no matter our nausea. It is perhaps significant that at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II the word
Inthroning
was substituted for the first time for
Inthronisation
, used in all previous coronations. This may be symptomatic of a revolt against the ugliness of
ise
and still more of
isation
, which Sir Alan Herbert has compared to
lavatory fittings, useful in their proper place but not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary for practical purposes.

Another popular way of making new words is to put
de
,
dis
or
non
at the beginning of a word in order to create one with an opposite meaning.
De
and
dis
are termed by the
OED
‘living prefixes with privative force'. ‘Living' is the right word. They have been living riotously of late. Anyone, it seems, can make a new verb by prefixing
de
to an existing one. Sir Alan, still on the warpath, drew up a list of a few remarkable creations of this sort, calling them ‘septic'. Among his examples were
derestrict
,
dewater
,
debureaucratise
,
decontaminate
,
dedirt
,
dehumidify
,
deratizate
(to eliminate rats),
deinsectize
,
*
dezincify
. (The Ministry of Food, I am told, once fixed maximum prices for
defeathered
geese.)

Some of these, it is to be hoped, may prove to be freaks of an occasion and will be seen no more. But there is a class that appears permanent. This comprises verbs that denote the undoing of something the doing of which called for—or at any rate was given—a special term. If to affect with gas is to
contaminate
, to enforce a speed limit is to
restrict
, and to commandeer a house is to
requisition
, then the cancellation of those things will inevitably, whether we like it or not, be
decontaminate
,
derestrict
and
derequisition
, and it is no use saying that they ought to be
cleanse
,
exempt
or
release
, or any other words that are not directly linked with their opposites. Most of the new
dis-
words since the war have been invented by
economists (several by
The Economist
itself).
Disincentive
and
disinflation
, received at first with surprised disapproval, seem to have quite settled down. It is recognised that the old-fashioned opposites of
incentive
and
inflation
—
deterrent
and
deflation
—will not do: we need a special word for the particular form of deterrent that discourages us from working hard, and for a process of checking inflation that is something less than deflation. Yet on the heels of these new arrivals come
diseconomy
and
dissaving
:

It would yield economies that would far outweigh the diseconomies that are the inevitable price of public ownership and giant size.

Some 13.4 million of the 22 million income earners … kept their spending in such exact step with their incomes that they saved or dissaved less than £25 in that year.

Will these be accepted also on the ground that in the first, no positive word—neither
extravagance
nor
waste
nor
wastefulness
—would express the writer's meaning so well as ‘diseconomies', and that in the second, ‘dissaved' is the only way of expressing the opposite of
saved
without a clumsy periphrasis that would destroy the nice balance of the sentence? Perhaps; it is at least certain that these words spring from deliberate and provocative choice and not from mental indolence. What is deplorable is that so many of those who go in for the invention of opposites by means of ‘living prefixes with privative force' do not know when to stop. It becomes a disease. ‘Disincentive' replaces
deterrent
, then ‘undisincentive' ousts
incentive
, and then
disincentive
itself has to yield to ‘non-undisincentive'. In George Orwell's ‘newspeak', which he pictured as the language of 1984, ‘very bad' has become ‘doubleplusungood'.

The same warning is needed about the prefix
non
. To put
non
in front of a word is a well-established way of creating a word
with the opposite meaning.
Non-appearance
,
non-combatant
,
non-conformist
and
non-existent
are common examples. But the lazy habit of using
non
to turn any word upside down, so as not to have the trouble of thinking of its opposite, is becoming sadly common. ‘Institutions for the care of the
non-sick
' presumably means something different from ‘institutions for the care of the healthy', but the difference is not apparent. I should have said that this trick was of recent origin if Mr G. M. Young had not sent me an early example of it that would hold against any modern rival. Sir John Simon, an eminent surgeon who later became a government official, giving evidence in 1869 before a Royal Commission on Sanitary Laws, referred to ‘a disease hereditarily transmissible and spreading among the non-fornicative part of the population'. Mr Young says he was surprised to come across this, because Simon was a man of culture and a friend of Ruskin. ‘It just shows', he adds unkindly, ‘what Whitehall can do.'

Yet another favourite device for making new words is the suffix
ee
. This is an erratic suffix, not conforming wholly to any rule. But in its main type it serves to denote the object of a verb, generally the indirect object, as in
assignee
,
referee
and
trustee
, but sometimes the direct object, as in
examinee
,
trainee
and
evacuee
. It therefore makes for confusion of language if the suffix is used to form a word meaning the subject of a verb.
Escapee
is worse than useless; we already have
escaper
. When unskilled labour is used to ‘dilute' skilled labour, the unskilled ought to be called not
dilutees
, as they are officially termed, but
dilutors
. The skilled are the
dilutees
. Apart from misuse such as this, we are getting too many
ee
words. They are springing up like weeds. Their purpose seems to be the same as that of many of our new verbs: to enable us to use one word instead of several. But we have got on very well for quite a long time without such words as
expellee
and
persecutee
.

While the age-long practice of creating new words has quickened its tempo, so has the no less ancient habit of extending the
meaning of established words. Here again we ought to examine the novelties on their merits, without bias. The main test for both is whether the new word, or the new meaning, fills a need in the vocabulary. If it is trying to take a seat already occupied—as the new verbs
decision
and
suspicion
are squatting in the places of
decide
and
suspect
, and the enlarged meanings of
anticipate
and
claim
in those of
expect
and
assert
—they are clearly harming the language by ‘blurring hard-won distinctions'. Still more are words like
overall
and
involve
open to that charge: they are claiming the seats of half a dozen or more honest words. But those that claim seats hitherto empty may deserve to be admitted.
Stagger
, for example, has recently enlarged its meaning logically and usefully in such a phrase as ‘staggered holidays'.

Nor do I see why purists should condemn the use of
nostalgic
not only for a feeling of homesickness but also for the emotion aroused by thinking of the days that are no more. An appeal to etymology is not conclusive. When a word starts to stray from its derivative meaning it may often be proper, and sometimes even useful, to try to restrain it. There are many now who would like to restrain the wanderlust of
alibi
and
shambles
. The ignorant misuse of technical terms excites violent reactions in those who know their true meanings. The popular use of
to the nth degree
in the sense of ‘to the utmost' exasperates the mathematician, who knows that strictly the notion of largeness is not inherent in
to the nth degree
at all. The use of
by and large
in the sense of ‘broadly speaking' exasperates the sailor, who knows that the true meaning of the phrase—alternately close to the wind and with the wind abeam or aft—has not the faintest relation to the meaning given to its present usage. But there is a point when it becomes idle pedantry to try to put back into their etymological cages words and phrases that escaped from them many years ago, and that are now settled down firmly elsewhere. To do so is to start on a path on which there is no logical stopping point short of such absurdities as
insisting that
muscle
means nothing but ‘little mouse', or that the word
anecdote
can only be applied to a story never told before, whereas we all know that now it generally means one told too often.

Sometimes words appear to have changed their meanings when the real change is in the popular estimate of the value of the ideas they stand for. So
imperialism
, which in 1881 Lord Rosebery, the future Liberal Prime Minister, could define as ‘the greater pride in Empire … a larger patriotism', has fallen from its pedestal. And
academic
is suffering a similar debasement owing to the waning of love of learning for its own sake and the growth of mistrust of intellectual activities that have no immediate utilitarian results. In music, according to the music critic of
The Times, academic
‘has descended from the imputation of high esteem to being a withering term of polite abuse', in spite of an attempt by Stanford, the composer, to stop the rot by describing it as ‘a term of opprobrium applied by those who do not know their business to those who do'.

Public opinion decides all these questions in the long run. There is little individuals can do about them. Our national vocabulary is a democratic institution, and what is generally accepted will ultimately be correct. I have no doubt that anyone happening to read this book in fifty years' time would find current objections to the use of certain words in certain senses as curious as we now find Swift's denunciation of the word
mob
. Lexicographers soon find this out. I have quoted Dr Johnson. Some seventy years later, Noah Webster was reported by the traveller Basil Hall to have said much the same thing in different words:

It is quite impossible to stop the progress of language—it is like the course of the Mississippi, the motion of which, at times, is scarcely perceptible; yet even then it possesses a momentum quite irresistible … Words and expressions will be forced into use, in spite of all the exertions of all the writers in the world.

The duty of the official is, however, clear. Just as it has long been recognised that, in salaries and wages, the Civil Service must neither walk ahead of public opinion nor lag behind it, but, in the old phrase, be ‘in the first flight of good employers', so it is the duty of officials in their use of English neither to perpetuate what is obsolescent nor to give currency to what is novel, but, like good servants, to follow what is generally regarded by their masters as the best practice for the time being. Among an official's readers will be vigilant guardians of the purity of English prose, and they must not be offended. So the official's vocabulary must contain only words that by general consent have passed the barrier; and no helping hand should be given to any that are still trying to get through, even if they appear deserving.

For last year's words belong to last year's language

And next year's words await another voice.

Mr Eliot adds to these lines from ‘Little Gidding', that in the sentence that is ‘right',

          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 new,

The common word exact without vulgarity,

The formal word precise but not pedantic,

The complete consort dancing together …

Note
. Gowers remarked in the middle of this chapter, ‘There is no saying how things will go'. But after more than half a century, it is at least possible to say what happened next to some of the new or ‘loathsome' words that he discussed in 1954.

The verb to
signature
, for example, has failed to stick, but to
underground
survives in the jargon of the National Grid, and to
contact
has become entirely unremarkable. To
service
, which he
thought a useful newcomer, almost immediately expanded its meaning into the unhappy realm of the utilitarian sex act.
Dissave
(to spend savings),
diseconomy
and
derestrict
persist as jargon, as does
derequisition
, though liberated from its narrow, post-war meaning.
Dehumidify
, another verb Gowers hoped would disappear completely, has now entered ordinary speech. To
reaccession
is still in use, but he was right that in general we should not be disposed to welcome it; and sadly, since the 1970s to
deaccession
has also found a place, ‘deaccessioning', selling off exhibits, being the last resort of the impoverished gallery or museum. Purists still fume when they find
mutual
and
aggravate
given the senses of ‘common' and ‘annoy' (making
mutual
mean ‘common' seems to have started with Shakespeare); however, a further word Gowers listed with those two,
phenomenal
, surely now means ‘prodigious' in anyone's vocabulary. As a poor reflection of modern politics,
expellee
and
persecutee,
after something of a lull, are coming back into ever greater use; and
amputee
, another word Gowers thought superfluous, is now unexceptionable. (Some people argue that
amputee
should refer not to the person who has endured surgery but to the bits that got taken off: to Nelson's arm, so to speak, and not the rest of him. At least one might agree that the word itself has been lopped, and should really be ‘amputatee'.)