Plain Words Read Online Free Page A

trouble
about
X, and that a railway clerk telephoned
to
him. He writes of a subject that
has not
a true antecedent, and of a person’s need to make sure he knows
what are
his rights of appeal. None of this sounds quite right any more, and so I have made small changes—what the managers of the London Underground call ‘upgrade works’. Habits of punctuation
and spelling have also altered over the decades. Gowers’s
to-day
,
jig-saw
,
mother-tongue
and
danger-signal
become
today
,
jigsaw
,
mother tongue
and
danger signal
;
acknowledgment
and
connexion
become
acknowledgement
and
connection
, etc. His fondness for semicolons, which was striking when he wrote, is even more striking today. Though I am fond of them too, and have left many in place, I have removed about a hundred from the book. There are various misquotations in the original that I have attempted to correct, and I have also very slightly reordered the contents where this makes the line of argument clearer.
    News Chronicle
, 14 April 1948
    Then there is the matter, mentioned earlier, of the use of
he
,
him
and
his
to stand for everyone. In the line referred to above, ‘make sure he knows what are his rights of appeal’, Gowers happened to be invoking the taxpayer; and in 1954 (though of course women also paid taxes) it was standard to use an indeterminate
he
to do so. There are those who still use this ‘makeshift expedient’, as it is called later in these pages, but there are others who would never think of it, and yet others who reject it on purpose. (Anyone who vaguely assumed of the London coroner mentioned earlier that she was a man, or who wrongly imagined likewise of the government minister excoriated by the
Daily Mail
that she was a man, must concede that supposedly neutral terms are not necessarily neutral in practice.) In 1965 Gowers admitted that he had spent ‘an awfully long time’ worrying over how to revise what he considered Fowler’s old-fashioned pronouncements in this area. Half a century on, opinions have moved further still. The indeterminate masculine pronoun, which Gowers eventually settled on calling a ‘risk’, is now so widely taken to be in breach of the very friendliness that he so keenly advocated, that I have removed all examples of the use from his writing.
    Few revisers faced with decisions of this kind can be so lucky as to have a manifesto by the original author to draw on, but Gowers’s preface to his revisions of Fowler provided me with just
such a guide. OUP had instructed him to keep as much of Fowler’s original work as possible, but asked him to remove any false predictions, and to make sure that no dead horses were being flogged. Gowers wrote in his preface: ‘I have been chary of making any substantial alterations except for the purpose of bringing him up to date’. And this has been my approach too.
    The saddest instance of a false assumption made by Gowers is found in a defence he gave of the word
ideology
. He believed it to be a useful alternative to
creed
, ‘now that people no longer care enough about religion to fight, massacre and enslave one another to secure the forms of its observance’. A few remarks of this kind, and the odd digression that is no longer apropos, I have quietly edited out of the text. I have also removed examples of obsolete advice, such as that a
casualty
is properly an accident and not the accident’s victim. But though it was easy to class various small points of this kind as dead horses, where I could not feel sure, I chose to be cautious.
    If I have left advice in the book that strikes readers as superfluous, I hope they will feel pleased that they did not need to be told rather than cross that they were. And if some of the current abuses that I mention go rapidly out of date, hurrah for that too. Many people who argue that ‘correctness’ is not of the utmost or even ‘upmost’ importance will still flinch at ‘organisationalised suboptimalism’, and agree that it