Tony’s Blair’s announcement of his departure from No. 10 Downing Street has naturally dominated the headlines today. There has been much written about his “legacy”. I want to draw attention to one less discussed aspect of that legacy – his deliberate misuse of words.
On many occasions in the last decade Blair has declared himself to be proud of making “difficult” decisions, or “hard” choices. He said this about the abolition of free University tuition in England, for example. I don’t think that was a difficult decision at all. Allowing Universities to collect money from students as well as directly from the government (who continue to contribute about 90% of the Universities’ budgets by direct grants anyway) wasn’t a difficult thing to do. I don’t think that the way this decision was reached would have been particularly arduous either.
Let me be clear. Blair’s use of the term “difficult” was simply a euphemism for “unpopular”. Doing things that are “difficult” or “hard” (especially if you deliberately choose to do them) means that you are courageous, steadfast, and tenacious, admirable characteristics for a leader.
Choosing words that make you sound like a hero when you are doing something you know your voters neither understand nor support is neither hard nor difficult.
In order to create publicity material to accompany the implementation of a law making it illegal to smoke in enclosed places, the UK Department of Health (DoH) have invented a new word: “smokefree”.
In fact they have an entire campaign going on about “Smokefree England“.
I am in despair about this. Not, let me explain, about the legislation. I am all in favour of banning smoking in pubs and restaurants as well as in the workplace. But I am in despair at this new word, and the way the DoH have chosen to use it.
It appears to be an adjective, and to mean “free of smoke”. But in their literature and on their web site the DoH have applied this adjective so widely as to make it meaningless. For a start, will the entire country of England be free of smoke of all kinds and in all places for 1st July? In fact, it will only be free of tobacco smoke in designated places. So “smokefree England” doesn’t make sense.
The literature prepared by the DoH refers to the “smokefree law”. Does that mean the legislation itself was free of smoke?
And don’t get me started on the new verb the DoH have introduced: “to go smokefree”!
I have always enjoyed citing Jane Austen’s use of “their” with a singular antecedent in rebuttal of the pedants who claim it must only be used with the plural (see the reference on Henry Churchyard’s Linguistics page, and many other citations on the Internet). As a technical writer using “their” in the singular is particularly useful (you can search for “+Austen +their +singular”). It is a boon to write phrases such as “the user may change their own password” and the like, rather than the inelegant “his or her password”. (I do know that there are other ways round this particular conundrum which may more easily appease the more formidable of the pedants.)
I was delighted therefore to glean another potential tidbit of linguistic knowledge from the lips of Jane Austen earlier this week – though this time, it was from a fictional incarnation of Jane rather than from the great lady herself. The film Becoming Jane is the story of a love affair which may or may not have taken place between the young Jane Austen (played by Anne Hathaway) and Thomas Lefroy (James McAvoy). An early encounter between them is at a local ball, while the sophisticated Lefroy is still disdainful of the modes and manners of the rural way of life. Jane tells Thomas that the the English “country dance” is so named because it derives from the French “contre-danse” (as couples stand opposite each other) rather than from the fact that it is danced by people in the countryside who know no better.
This etymology sounds plausible enough. But a good researcher always checks his sources so I trundled off to my trusty OED to see what they had to say on the subject (note the plural pronoun with the singular antecedent again). Well, they were having none of it. They could find no evidence at all for the assertion that the French term “contre-danse” predated the English “country dance”, and called the derivation quoted by the fictional Jane “erroneous”. They did however go into some detail on the origin and popularity of this incorrect etymology, even citing an article from the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1758 which supports it.
So although the etymology quoted by the fictional Jane to the fictional Lefroy was not correct, it is certainly something that an educated person in the 1790s may well have believed to be true. An accurate inaccuracy, in fact, as Jane herself might have put it.
