Plain Words Read Online Free Page B

is worth resisting new words of the type that Gowers called ‘repulsive etymologically’.
    In this edition of
Plain Words
,
I
, other than in these few paragraphs of the Preface, is always Ernest Gowers’s authorial voice. Any interjection of mine, designed to bring a subject up to date, is clearly marked as a ‘Note’, or is a footnote, and finishes with a tilde glyph: ~.
    Of course a person revising a usage guide lives in fear of being caught out and found wanting. In his private letters, Gowers wrote anxiously of captious, zestful critics waiting to pick out
errors in his work. * I have had scrutineers of my own attempting to save me from this fate, to whom I am extremely grateful, but all flaws of revision in these pages remain my responsibility alone. I do not doubt that I will be thought of by today’s old hatters as a mad hatter, and by today’s mad hatters as an old hatter, and by both, probably, as a bad hatter: because I dared to tinker with a much loved work, because I bothered to do so, because I did not tinker with it enough. And there is no way to proof oneself against all these objections at once. But what I can say is that in revising a book known over decades for making people smile, my greatest wish was that it should continue to do so a little longer.
    For the sheer hard work on this project by many of them, and the encouragement given to me by all, I would like to thank Ann Scott, Patrick and Caroline Gowers, Timothy Gowers and Julie Barrau, Katharine Gowers, Tanglewest Douglas, Raymond Douglas, Helen Small, Mark Kilfoyle, Derek Johns, Bryan Garner, Rebecca Lee and Marina Kemp.
    Rebecca Gowers
    October 2013

I
Prologue
    Do but take care to express your self in a plain easy manner, in well-chosen, significant and decent Terms, and to give an harmonious and easy Turn to your Periods. Study to explain your Thoughts, and set them in the truest Light, labouring, as much as possible, not to leave ’em dark nor intricate, but clear and intelligible.
    C ERVANTES , quoted in M AYANS Y S ISCAR ’s
Life
,
trans. John Ozell, 1738
    The final cause of speech is to get an idea as exactly as possible out of one mind into another. Its formal cause therefore is such choice and disposition of words as will achieve this end most economically.
    G. M. Y OUNG ,
Last Essays
, 1950
    The purpose of this book is to help officials in their use of written English as a tool of their trade. I suspect that this project may be received by many of them without any marked enthusiasm or gratitude. ‘Even now,’ they may say, ‘it is all we can do to keep our heads above water, turning out at top speed writing in which we say what we mean after our own fashion. Not one in a thousand of the people who will read our work knows the difference between good English and bad, so what is the use of all this highbrow stuff? It will only prevent us from getting on with the job.’
    But what is this job that must be got on with? Writing is an instrument for conveying ideas from one mind to another; your job as a writer is to make the reader grasp your meaning readily and precisely. Do you always say just what you mean? Do you yourself always know just what you mean? Even when you know what you mean, and say it in a way that is clear to you, will it always be equally clear to your reader? If not, you have not been getting on with the job. ‘The difficulty of literature’, said Robert Louis Stevenson in
Virginibus Puerisque
, ‘is not to write, but to write what you mean; not to affect your reader, but to affect him precisely as you wish.’ Let us take one or two examples given later in this book to illustrate particular faults, and, applying this test to them, ask ourselves whether the reader is likely to catch at once the meaning of
Prices are basis prices per ton for the representative-basis-pricing specification and size and quantity.
    or of
Where particulars of a partnership are disclosed to the Executive Council the remuneration of