It’s just as I prognosed!

by Jack Posted on August 17, 2011

A friend phoned the other day to ask if I thought that prognose was a real word. 

I assured her that it was. But I also said that she was unlikely to find it in an everyday dictionary. And her spellchecker would probably reject it. Nevertheless, prognose has been part of the English language for the best part of a hundred years. It’s a back-formation from prognosis. And you will find it in the two-volume Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. 

Why did she ask? 

‘I’ve just heard a guy on the radio saying that something or other was just as he had prognosed,’ she said. 

Something or other? 

‘Yeah, I didn’t quite catch what. I was distracted by the word prognose.’ 

Back-forming verbs from nouns is a fine old English tradition. During the 16th and 17th centuries, the language acquired a great many useful verbs from nouns. Dog, fuel, herd, joke, pocket and voice are just some of them. 

Perhaps there was a time when these verbs too would have distracted my friend. But I doubt it. Some words just seem to work better than others. 

Take, for example, the verb trouser, meaning to pocket or to appropriate – especially dishonestly. To me, this seems to be a pretty successful coinage. Whereas surveil (another word your spellchecker will probably reject) just seems wrong – even though it has been in use, sporadically, for about 50 years. 

As my friend conveniently demonstrated, the test is not whether or not the word is ‘real’. The test is whether or not the word will sit comfortably with your intended reader or listener. 

If only the guy on the radio had said that it was just as he had predicted, my friend might now know what it was that he had predicted. As it is, she has no idea. – Jack Scrivano

Posted in Clarity, Plain English, Word Origins | Leave a comment

Bloody posh booze

by Jack Posted on August 13, 2011

Words have always fascinated me. Even before I could read I wanted to know why certain words were the way they were. Unfortunately, there has never been any shortage of people ready and willing to provide answers.

Take bloody – as in ‘a bloody good effort’. I remember the headmaster of my primary school generously explaining this one.

He assured me – with the unchallengeable authority of a headmaster – that bloody was a late-18th century contraction of By Our Lady. ‘A bit like fo’c’s’le,’ I remember him saying.

But, as I later discovered, John Dryden used ‘bloody drunk’ as long ago as 1684, by which he meant ‘as drunk as a blood’, ‘as drunk as a lord’ – a blood being an aristocratic rake of ‘good blood’. And soon after that all sorts of people were being bloody passionate and bloody clever. Well, they still are, aren’t they?

Well-meaning pedagogues also assured me that posh was derived from ‘port out, starboard home’, the cabin requirements of well-to-do folk travelling by sea between England and India. The abbreviation – POSH – was supposed to have been printed on their tickets. But it seems that not a single one of these posh tickets has survived. Which is a pity.

Could posh have is simply been borrowed from the long-established cant term for money?

I can’t recall who first told me about James Daly. But I do remember thinking that his was an interesting story. Really interesting.

Mr Daly was a Dublin impresario who is supposed to have wagered some friends that he could introduce a new word into the English language within 24 hours. With the bets in (the story goes) Mr Daly papered Dublin with posters bearing the letters Q, U, I, and Z. And the following day, all of Dublin were talking about the mystery that was quiz.

Alas, Mr Daly’s posters seem to have suffered the same fate as the posh tickets. Could the Latin Qui es? (Who are you?) be a more likely source?

Yet another elusive character from the world of dead certain explanations was Mr Edward Booze’s booze. Mr Booze was a Prohibition entrepreneur who made hard liquor and sold it in distinctive log-cabin-shaped bottles. Or at least, that’s what I heard. But evidence of Mr Booze’s enterprise is as hard to find as evidence of the posh tickets and Mr Daly’s posters.

Could it be that the 14th century word bouse meaning ‘to drink deeply’ or ‘to guzzle’ was the true origin? The word went out of fashion for a while in the 15th century but then made a comeback late in the 16th century. And, since then, while the spelling has wandered about a bit, the word itself has never really left.

Words still fascinate me. But these days, when someone gives me a superficially-beguiling explanation of a word’s origin, I tend to ask if they have any evidence to go with their explanation. – Jack Scrivano

Posted in Clarity, Plain English, Word Origins | Leave a comment

Avoiding camels and badly-designed horses

by Jack Posted on August 10, 2011

Alec Issigonis, the Greek-born British racing driver and designer of the Morris Minor and the original Mini, once observed that, when a committee sets out to design a horse, the result is usually a camel.

Well, perhaps. If you are very lucky.

But more often than not, when a committee sets out to design a horse, the result is just a badly-designed horse; a horse of which no one is proud; a horse to which no one really wants to put their name.

And, in my experience, the same is true of most documents written by committees.

Committees can discuss. Committees can plan. Committees can even decide. But I have yet to meet a committee that can write the kind of document that a reader would enjoy reading.

I mentioned this recently to a couple of committee members who were struggling to pull together a report that had been written by a team of seven – mainly engineers and finance people.

‘Oh, people don’t have to enjoy this report,’ one of them said. ‘They just have to read it.’

But therein lies the problem. It’s human nature to do the stuff that we find enjoyable and rewarding, and to avoid the stuff that we don’t. If your report is not a ‘good read’, there is a very good chance that your intended reader won’t actually read it.

So, by all means, use your committee to agree on who the intended reader is and what the key message needs to be. It may even make sense to use your committee to brainstorm some of your document’s content. But when it comes to the actual writing, find the best writer you can. And let them get on with it.

A document that doesn’t get read is of even less value than a badly-designed horse. At least the horse can be turned into glue. – Jack Scrivano

Posted in Better communication, Clarity, Plain English | Leave a comment

News of an earlier world

by Jack Posted on August 6, 2011

Recently, I happened upon a newspaper that had somehow managed to avoid the recycling bin for more than 80 years.

The paper itself had taken on the colour of lightly-brewed tea, and some of the pages were a bit frayed at the edges. But, all in all, it was in pretty good condition. It was certainly possible to read every word. And I did, indeed, read quite a few of them.

On the front page, the main story was about some now-forgotten by-election and, at the time the paper went to press, the result was still very much in the balance. I didn’t recognise the names of the neck-and-neck candidates and I am assuming that neither went on to make the kind of contribution to history that would place them among the 20th century’s household names.

Throughout the paper there were local stories, national stories, and international stories. There were stories of good deeds and bad. And there were stories of minor foolishness and outright evil.

What struck me as I read these stories from the days of my grandfather was the quality of the prose. Most of the stories were textbook examples of the who, what, when and where model. And, every now and then, one of the stories also attempted to answer why.

The writing was clear and concise and a joy to read. And where a story contained both fact and opinion, it was made crystal clear to the reader where one ended and the other began.

There were no stories pointlessly labelled EXCLUSIVE. There were no stories about people who were famous just for being famous. And there were no snide asides – or at least, if there were, they passed me by.

If I did my sums correctly, it seems that back in 1931 the price one had to pay for all this fine writing was, in real terms, almost three times the price of a modern newspaper. But I guess in an era when you weren’t paying for cable TV and a broadband internet connection, that might have seemed like quite a good deal.

Come to think of it, for writing of that quality, I’d probably be happy to pay that price today. – Jack Scrivano

Posted in Better communication, Clarity, Plain English | Leave a comment

Big words for small matters

by Jack Posted on August 2, 2011

More than 200 years ago, Samuel Johnson cautioned his fellow journalists ‘Do not accustom yourself to use big words for small matters’. Oh that some of today’s scribblers would heed your advice, Sam.

Over the past few days, I have heard one TV news reporter describing an event that was not even particularly unusual as very unique. I heard another reporter saying utilise three times when she really meant use. And I heard the anchor of the same news programme referring to an event that a very small handful of people had, apparently, been eagerly awaiting as one of the most anticipated events of the year.

As far as the boys and girls at KiwiStreet are concerned, something is either unique or it is not. There are no degrees of uniqueness.

To utilise means to put to good use something which might otherwise be wasted. It is not simply a posh synonym for to use.

And while the anchor was probably only reading something that someone else had written, he should have known that, strictly speaking, anticipate means to be aware of something in advance and to take steps to deal with it.

English is a living language. Over time, new words are coined, old words fall by the wayside, and, yes, meanings change. Over recent years, boot has acquired an additional meaning; gendering, greenage, and jet wash have found their way into the Oxford English Dictionary; and matronise has pretty much retreated into obscurity. And there is good reason for each of these changes.

What is disappointing about the TV newscasters’ misuse of unique, utilise and anticipate (and several other words too) is that there was no good reason to misuse them. Like Willy Nilly, the postman in Dylan Thomas’s Under Milk Wood, the newscasters simply found themselves with ‘very small news’. And in trying to make the very small news sound more important than it really was, they not only misled their audience, they sullied some perfectly useful words.

Against Dr Johnson’s advice, they attempted to use ‘big words for small matters’. And the result was far from pretty. – Jack Scrivano

Posted in Better communication, Clarity | Leave a comment

Blood sausage, anyone?

by Jack Posted on July 29, 2011

Dining recently in a restaurant where 95 percent of the menu was in English, I couldn’t help noticing that one of the main course dishes was described as ‘Seared scallops with boudin noir’.

I wondered if the chef had found that diners preferred the more elegant-sounding boudin noir to black pudding or blood sausage. It also reminded me of a breakfast I had in a hotel in Wells, Somerset.

At the table next to me, a Finnish couple was struggling with the English menu. Each time the waitress passed their table, they asked her to explain some unfamiliar item. On the fourth or fifth pass, the man flagged down the waitress and asked her to explain ‘black pudding supreme’.

‘It’s our local award-winning black pudding,’ the waitress said.

The man frowned. ‘And what is black pudding?’

‘Oh, you don’t want to know,’ the waitress said.

‘But I do,’ the man insisted.

‘Well,’ the waitress said, ‘it’s a sort of sausage.’

The man smiled. ‘Sausage is good.’

‘And it’s made from seasoned fat and congealed pig’s blood,’ the waitress added.

‘Oh,’ the man said sadly. ‘Blood sausage. You should have said. We have blood sausage in Finland too. Don’t worry; it’s no good there either.’

I guess the moral of the story is: For effective communication, it’s generally better not to beat about the bush too much.

Posted in Better communication, Clarity | Leave a comment

A lesson from history

by Jack Posted on July 25, 2011

Over the past few weeks I’ve been rereading Winston Churchill’s A History of the English-Speaking Peoples.

Churchill was a lifelong history fan. He was also an excellent writer. He began writing the four-volume history in 1937. But it wasn’t until 1956 that the first two volumes were published. The third volume followed in 1957 and the fourth volume, subtitled The Great Democracies, in 1958.

Churchill’s approach to history has often been criticised for its lack of attention to social and economic aspects. A History of the English-Speaking Peoples focuses on war and politics, soldiers and statesmen. One of Churchill’s political opponents, Clement Attlee, even suggested that it should have been called Things in History That Interest Me. By me, Atlee of course meant Churchill.

But there is rather less argument about the quality of Churchill’s writing. More than 50 years on, it still has a freshness that makes many more recent works seem ponderous, even turgid. Take this paragraph from the section on the Crimea War:

[The Light Brigade] captured the guns but only a third of the brigade answered the first muster after the charge. Lord Cardigan calmly returned to the yacht on which he lived, had a bath, dined, drank a bottle of champagne, and went to bed. His brigade had performed an inspiring feat of gallantry. But it was due, like much else in this war, to the blunders of commanders. Lord Raglan’s orders had been badly expressed and were misunderstood by his subordinates. The Light Brigade had charged the wrong guns.

It’s not bad, is it?

It’s filled with information. It offers an interesting insight into Cardigan (and certainly not one I recall from my school days). It leads nicely to the ‘punch line’: The Light Brigade had charged the wrong guns. And there’s not a single difficult or pompous word to trip up the reader.

The chairman of a research company asked recently if there was a simple way to get his people to write in a more accessible style. I suggested that he get them to read a bit of Churchill.

Posted in Clarity, Plain English | Leave a comment