You must not confuse this Jargon with what is called Journalese. The two overlap, indeed, and have a knack of assimilating each other’s vices. But Jargon finds, maybe, the most of its votaries among good douce people who have never written to or for a newspaper in their life, who would never talk of “adverse climatic conditions” when they mean “bad weather”; who have never trifled with verbs such as “obsess,” “recrudesce,” “envisage,” “adumbrate,” or with phrases such as “the psychological moment,” “the true inwardness,” “it gives furiously to think.” It dallies with Latinity—“sub silentio,” “de die in diem,” “cui bono?” (always in the sense, unsuspected by Cicero, of “What is the profit?”)—but not for the sake of style. Your journalist at the worst is an artist in his way: he daubs paint of this kind upon the lily with a professional zeal; the more flagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the pigment, the happier is his soul. Like the Babu he is trying all the while to embellish our poor language, to make it more floriferous, more poetical—like the Babu for example who, reporting his mother’s death, wrote, “Regret to inform you, the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.”
There is metaphor: there is ornament: there is a sense of poetry, though as yet groping in a world unrealised. No such gusto marks—no such zeal, artistic or professional, animates—the practitioners of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat), douce respectable persons. Caution is its father: the instinct to save everything and especially trouble: its mother, Indolence. It looks precise, but it is not. It is, in these times, safe: a thousand men have said it before and not one to your knowledge had been prosecuted for it. And so, like respectability in Chicago, Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst. It is becoming the language of Parliament: it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and so voice the reason of their being.
Has a Minister to say “No” in the House of Commons? Some men are constitutionally incapable of saying no: but the Minister conveys it thus—“The answer to the question is in the negative.” That means “no.” Can you discover it to mean anything less, or anything more except that the speaker is a pompous person?—which was no part of the information demanded.
That is Jargon, and it happens to be accurate. But as a rule Jargon is by no means accurate, its method being to walk circumspectly around its target; and its faith, that having done so it has either hit the bull’s-eye or at least achieved something equivalent, and safer.
Thus the Clerk of a Board of Guardians will minute that—
In the case of John Jenkins deceased the coffin provided was of the usual character.
Now this is not accurate. “In the case of John Jenkins deceased,” for whom a coffin was supplied, it is wholly superfluous to tell us that he is deceased. But actually John Jenkins never had more than one case, and that was the coffin. The Clerk says he had two—a coffin in a case: but I suspect the Clerk to be mistaken, and I am sure he errs in telling us that the coffin was of the usual character: for coffins have no character, usual or unusual.
For another example (I shall not tell you whence derived)—
In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first class [So you see the lucky fellow gets a case as well as a first-class. He might be a stuffed animal: perhaps he is] In the case of every candidate who is placed in the first class the class-list will show by some convenient mark (1) the Section or Sections for proficiency in which he is placed in the first class and (2) the Section or Sections (if any) in which he has passed with special distinction.
“The Section or Sections (if any)”—But, how, if they are not any, could they be indicated by a mark however convenient?
The Examiners will have regard to the style and method of the candidate’s answers, and will give credit for excellence in these respects.
Have you begun to detect the two main vices of Jargon? The first is that it uses circumlocution rather than short straight speech. It says “In the case of John Jenkins deceased, the coffin” when it means “John Jenkins’s coffin”: and its yea is not yea, neither is its nay nay: but its answer is in the affirmative or in the negative, as the foolish and superfluous “case” may be. The second vice is that it habitually chooses vague woolly abstract nouns rather than concrete ones. I shall have something to say by-and-by about the concrete noun, and how you should ever be struggling for it whether in prose or in verse. For the moment I content myself with advising you, if you would write masculine English, never to forget the old tag of your Latin Grammar—
Masculine will only be
Things that you can touch and see.
But since these lectures are meant to be a course in First Aid to writing, I will content myself with one or two extremely rough rules: yet I shall be disappointed if you do not find them serviceable.
The first is:—Whenever in your reading you come across one of these words, “case,” “instance,” “character,” “nature,” “condition,” “persuasion,” “degree”—whenever in writing your pen betrays you to one or another of them—pull yourself up and take thought. If it be “case” (I choose it as Jargon’s dearest child—“in Heaven yclept Metonomy”) turn to the dictionary, if you will, and seek out what meaning can be derived from casus, its Latin ancestor: then try how, with a little trouble, you can extricate yourself
