Plain Words

by Rebecca Gowers

  ST PAUL, First Epistle to the Corinthians

  THE LURE OF THE ABSTRACT WORD

  The reason for preferring the concrete to the abstract is clear. Your purpose must be to make your meaning plain. Even concrete words have a penumbra of uncertainty round them, but an incomparably larger one surrounds all abstract words. If you are using an abstract word when you might use a concrete one you are handicapping yourself in your task, difficult enough in any case, of making yourself understood.

  Unfortunately the very vagueness of abstract words is one of the reasons for their popularity. To express one’s thoughts accurately is hard work, and to be precise is sometimes dangerous. We are tempted by the safer obscurity of the abstract. It is the greatest vice of present-day writing. Numerous writers seem to find it more natural to say ‘Was this the realisation of an anticipated liability?’ than ‘Did you expect to have to do this?’; to say ‘Communities where anonymity in personal relationships prevails’ than ‘Communities where people do not know one another’. To resist this temptation, and to resolve to make your meaning plain to your reader even at the cost of some trouble to yourself, is more important than any other single thing if you would convert a flabby style into a crisp one.

  An excessive reliance on the noun at the expense of the verb will, in the end, detach the mind of the writer from the realities of here and now, and from when and how and in what mood the thing was done. It will insensibly induce a habit of abstraction and vagueness. To what lengths this can go may be illustrated by these two examples:

  The desirability of attaining unanimity so far as the general construction of the body is concerned is of considerable importance from the production aspect.

  The actualisation of the motivation of the forces must to a great extent be a matter of personal angularity.

  The first, which says that it ‘relates to the building of vehicles’, means, I suppose, that in order to produce vehicles quickly it is important to agree on a standard body. The meaning of the second is past conjecture. (Its perpetrator was an economist, not an official.)

  Here are two less extreme examples of the habit of using abstract words to say in a complicated way something that might be said simply and directly:

  A high degree of carelessness, pre-operative and post-operative, on the part of some of the hospital staff, took place. (Some of the hospital staff were very careless both before and after the operation.)

  The cessation of house-building operated over a period of five years. (No houses were built for five years.)

  Note the infelicity of ‘a cessation operated’. ‘Operate’ is just what cessations cannot do.

  Sometimes abstract words are actually invented, so powerful is the lure of saying things this way:

  The reckonability of former temporary service for higher leave entitlement.

  The following is not official writing, but as it appeared in a newspaper that never shrinks from showing up the faults of official writing, it deserves a place:

  Initiation of a temporary organisation to determine European economic requirements in relation to proposals by Mr Marshall, American Secretary of State, was announced in the House of Commons this evening.

  This way of expressing oneself seems to be tainting official speech as well as writing. ‘We want you to deny indirect reception,’ said the goods clerk of my local railway station, telephoning me about a missing suitcase. ‘What does that mean?’ I asked. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘we want to make sure that the case has not reached you through some other station.’

  Exponents of the newer sciences are fond of expressing themselves in abstractions. Perhaps this is unavoidable, but I cannot help thinking that they sometimes make things unnecessarily difficult for their readers. I have given an example on the last page of an economist’s wrapping up his meaning in an impenetrable mist of abstractions. Here is one from psychology:

  Reserves that are occupied in continuous uni-directional adjustment of a disorder, as is the case in compensative existence, are fixed or mortgaged reserves. They are no longer available for use in the ever-varying interplay of organism and environment in the spontaneity of mutual synthesis.

  (I. H. Pearse and L. H. Crocker, The Peckham Experiment, 1943)

  In official writing the words availability, lack and dearth contribute much to the same practice, though they do not produce the same obscurity. Perhaps the reason those words are so popular is that we have suffered so much from what it is fashionable to call a ‘lack of availability’ of so many useful things:

  The actual date of the completion of the purchase should coincide with the availability of the new facilities. (The purchase should not be completed until the new facilities are available.)

  ‘There is a complete lack of spare underground wire’ is not the natural way of saying ‘We have no spare underground wire’, or ‘A dearth of information exists’ for ‘We have very little information’.

  POSITION AND SITUATION

  The words position and situation greatly fascinate those who are given to blurring the sharp outlines of what they have to say. A debate takes place in the House of Commons about an acute scarcity of coal during a hard winter. A speaker wants to say that it is hard to imagine how the Government could have made sure of there being enough coal. Does the speaker say this? No; the thought is enveloped in a miasma of abstract words, and is given like this instead: ‘In view of all the circumstances I do not see how this situation could have been in any way warded off’. Later, someone speaking for the Government wants to strike a reassuring note, and to express confidence that we shall get through the winter without disaster. ‘We shall’, says the second speaker, also taking refuge in abstractions, ‘ease through this position without any deleterious effect on the situation.’

  It fell to a master of words to make an announcement at a time of grave crisis. Sir Winston Churchill did not begin his broadcast of the 17th June 1940, ‘The position in regard to France is extremely serious’. He began: ‘The news from France is very bad’. He did not end it, ‘We have absolute confidence that eventually the situation will be restored’. He ended: ‘We are sure that in the end all will be well’.

  Position and situation, besides replacing more precise words, have a way of intruding into sentences that can do better without them. These words should be regarded as danger signals, and if you find yourself using one, try to think whether you cannot say what you have to say more directly:

  It may be useful for Inspectors to be informed about the present situation on this matter. (To know how this matter now stands.)

  Unless these wagons can be moved the position will soon be reached where there will be no more wagons to be filled. (There will soon be no more …)

  Should the position arise where a hostel contains a preponderance of public assistance cases … (If a hostel gets too many public assistance cases …)

  All three sentences run more easily if we get rid of the situation and the positions.

  Position in regard to is an ugly expression, not always easy to avoid, but used more often than it need be. ‘The position in regard to the supply of labour and materials has deteriorated’ seems to come more naturally to the pen than ‘It is now harder to get labour and materials’. ‘No one has any doubt’, writes the Manchester Guardian, ‘that deceased senior officials of the Civil Service have in regard to engraved on their hearts; and their successors to-day show no recovery from this kind of hereditary lockjaw.’ But it is not fair to put all the blame on officials. Even The Times is capable of saying, ‘The question of the British position in regard to the amount of authorisation’, rather than ‘the question how much Britain is to get of the amount authorised’.

  Note. When Gowers came to revise Fowler, he added an entry under the heading ‘abstractitis’: the disease, he said, was endemic, and he warned that the habit of using misty, abstract words would slowly cloud a person’s thoughts, making the difficult business of clear writing even harder.

  As no cure
for this disease has yet been discovered, today’s body of English is abundantly spotted with new abstract words. Academics must discover their own ‘positionality’ or be damned, translators are forced to ruminate on the ‘situationality’ of what they are translating, businesses find themselves worrying about how to ‘organisationalise’ useful data, old buses are ‘allocated for air-conditionisation’, and companies that deliver parcels require ‘sortation facilities’ for their toiling ‘sortation facility operatives’.

  Official writing too is nowadays speckled with words like proportionality, conditionality, operationality, interoperationality and operationalisation. Herefordshire Council is standing up for ‘greater transactionalisation’ of its services; one has the dim sense that this means getting more people to use them. The Government’s Committee on Radioactive Waste Management must face down the ‘necessary provisionality’ of the advice it receives: the fact that specialists cannot be sure how long their advice will stand. The Government in Scotland is worried about the ‘occupationalisation’ of unpaid carers, defined as ‘a task based approach to caring which looks not at the carer but only at the caring tasks’—thereby, the explanation continues, putting at risk the opportunity for unpaid carers ‘to be all that they are and want to be’, which would seem to set the bar for improving their lot rather high. A Department for Transport document on ‘highways assignments modelling techniques’ gives as its first objective, ‘To review current and foreseeable wider modelling requirements and policy analysis requirement to identify the functionality that highway assignment modelling needs to provide to meet them’. Plainly put, this means, ‘To decide how detailed our estimates of road use need to be now, and will need to be in future, so that we can work out how to produce the required estimates’. On its own, the phrase to ‘provide functionality’ means nothing much more than to be able to do something.

  If there were ever an ugliness contest for words of this sort, ‘operationalisation’ would be a fair bet to win. It is most often used as though it means roughly ‘making X work’. For instance, in a report for the Department of Social Security on ways of encouraging pensioners to claim certain benefits, it is stated that a given method ‘should be … capable of operationalisation across all Benefits Agency offices’. Here ‘should be … capable of operationalisation’ means simply should work, or indeed must work. In a more insidious example, a report for the Department of Work and Pensions on ‘persistent employment disadvantage’ concerns itself deeply with the fact that how you define disabled governs who is classed as disabled. The author observes that those devising a census form must make up their minds on this matter, and speaks of a sinister ‘census operationalisation of disability’. This appears to mean that classing people as disabled makes them disabled, with the politically seductive corollary that those whom you refuse to class as disabled somehow become, and thus may (more cheaply) be treated as being, fully fit.

  THE ABSTRACT APPENDAGE

  This brings us to what has been called the ‘abstract appendage’; for position, situation and conditions find themselves in that role more commonly than any other words. In a letter to The Times objecting to the phrase ‘weather conditions’, the writer quotes two lines from Thomas Hardy’s poem, ‘Weathers’:

  This is the weather the shepherd shuns,

  And so do I …

  The BBC, the correspondent suggests, would be more likely to say, ‘These are the weather conditions the shepherd shuns …’.

  ‘Weather conditions’ can perhaps be defended as importing a larger idea than weather alone does (it embraces the conditions created by yesterday’s weather and the likelihood of tomorrow’s weather changing them). But the attack, though badly aimed, was directed against a real fault in official English. If the attack had been made the next day on the announcement that blizzard conditions had returned to the Midlands, it could not have been met with any such plea. It was not ‘blizzard conditions’ that had returned, it was a blizzard. Similarly it is both unnecessary and quaint to say that temperatures will return to ‘normal values’ instead of merely that they will return to normal. Level has also been greatly in demand of late as an abstract appendage. A correspondent has kindly presented me with a collection of hundreds of specimens, ranging from ‘pub-and-street-corner-level’ to ‘world-level’ through every conceivable intermediate level. This passion for picturing all our relationships with one another as stratifications is an odd phenomenon at a time when we are supposed to be developing into a classless State.

  THE HEADLINE PHRASE

  Serious harm is also being done to the language by excessive use of nouns as adjectives. In the past, as I have said, the language has been greatly enriched by this free-and-easy habit. We are surrounded by innumerable examples—War Department, Highway Code, Nursery School, Coronation Service, Trades Union Congress and so on. But something has gone wrong recently with this useful practice, and its abuse is corrupting English prose. It has become natural to say ‘World population is increasing faster than world food production’ instead of ‘The population of the world is increasing faster than the food it produces’; ‘The eggs position exceeds all expectation’ instead of ‘Eggs are more plentiful than expected’. It is old fashioned to write of the ‘state of the world’; it must be the ‘world situation’. As was observed by Lord Dunsany, writer, marksman and friend of Yeats, in his Donnellan Lectures of 1943, the fact is that ‘too many ofs have dropped out of the language, and the dark of the floor is littered with this useful word’. And so we meet daily with headlines like ‘England side captain selection difficulty rumour’.

  This sort of language is no doubt pardonable in a newspaper, where as many stimulating words as possible must be crowded into spaces so small that treaties have had to become pacts; ambassadors, envoys; investigations, probes; and all forms of human enterprise, bids. Headlines have become a language of their own, knowing no law and often quite incomprehensible until one has read the article that they profess to summarise. ‘Insanity Rules Critic’ and ‘W. H. Smith Offer Success’ have quite different meanings from their apparent ones. Who could know what is meant by ‘Hanging Probe Names Soon’ without having read on and discovered that ‘The names of the members of the Royal Commission on Capital Punishment will shortly be announced’? Who could guess that the headline ‘Unofficial Strikes Claim’ introduces a report of a speech by a member of Parliament who said that there was abundant evidence that unofficial strikes were organised and inspired by Communists as part of a general plan originating from abroad? I do not see how those three words by themselves can have any meaning at all. To me they convey a vague suggestion of the discovery of oil or gold by someone who ought not to have been looking for it. And if the announcement ‘Bull Grants Increase’ is construed grammatically, it does not seem to deserve a headline at all: one would say that that was no more than was to be expected from any conscientious bull.

  But what may be pardonable in headlines will not do in the text, nor is it suitable in English prose generally. For instance:

  Food consumption has been dominated by the world supply situation. (People have had to eat what they could get.)

  An extra million tons of steel would buy our whole sugar import requirements. (All the sugar we need to import.)

  The only thing that can be said for the following sentence is that it does not end ‘sites preparation’:

  Everything is being done to expedite plant installation within the limiting factors of steel availability and the preparation of sites.

  This should have run: ‘So far as steel is available and sites can be prepared, everything is being done to expedite the installation of plant’.

  An exceptionally choice example is:

  The programme must be on the basis of the present head of labour ceiling allocation overall.

  Here head of labour means number of workers. Ceiling means maximum. Overall, as usual, means nothing.* The whole sentence means ‘The programme must be on the assumption tha
t we get the maximum number of workers at present allotted to us’.

  The use of a noun as an adjective should be avoided where the same word is already an adjective with a different meaning. Do not, for instance, say ‘material allocation’ when you mean ‘allocation of material’, but reserve that expression against a time when you may want to make clear that the allocation you are considering is not a spiritual one. For the same reason this phrase is not felicitous:

  In view of the restrictions recently imposed on our capital economic situation …

  By way of emphasising that the official is by no means the only offender, I will add an example from an American sociological book discussed in an article in The Economist:

  Examination of specific instances indicated that in most cases where retirement dissatisfaction existed advance activity programming by individuals had been insignificant or even lacking.

  I translate with diffidence, but the meaning seems to be:

  Examination of specific instances indicated that most of those who did not wish to retire had given little or no thought to planning their future.

  Note. The humour of Gowers’s example above, ‘our capital economic situation’, has dated (few people now use capital to mean splendid), but the Vatican milks a lasting joke on the same grammatical lines for the title of its weekly radio show, ‘The Latin Lover’. Of course where a double meaning of this sort has been arrived at by mistake, context will usually forestall confusion over what sense was intended. Yet faced solely with the headline, ‘Tussaud Giant Delivery Mixup Nightmare’, a reader would have no way of knowing whether a great number of standard waxwork figures had gone astray, or a single seven-footer.