with care. When it is thrown into the middle of the confounding phrase ‘regardless … or not’ it becomes positively boggling, as the Department for Communities and Local Government demonstrates in one of its attempts to explain current planning law to the public:
With all building work, the owner of the property (or land) in question is ultimately responsible for complying with the relevant planning rules and building regulations (regardless of the need to apply for planning permission and/or building regulations approval or not). ~
Do not allow
per
to get too free with the English language. Such convenient abbreviations as
mph
and
rpm
are no doubt
with us for good. But generally it is well to confine
per
to its own language, e.g.
per cent
,
per capita
,
per contra
, and to avoid writing ‘as
per
my letter’ for ‘as I said in my letter’. Even for phrases in which
per
is linked to a Latin word, there are often English equivalents that serve at least as well, and possibly better. ‘£100 a year’ is more natural than ‘£100
per annum
’, and
per se
does not ordinarily mean anything more than ‘by itself’ or ‘in itself’. Another Latin word better left alone is
re
. This is the ablative case of the Latin word
res
. It means ‘in the matter of’. It is used by lawyers for the title of lawsuits, such as ‘
In re
John Doe deceased’, and has passed into commercialese as an equivalent of the English preposition
about
. It has no business there, or in official writing. It is not needed either in a heading (‘re your application for a permit’), which can stand without its support, or in the body of a letter, where an honest
about
will serve your purpose better.
A correspondent has sent me the following example of the baleful influence of commercialese:
Payment of the above account, which is now overdue at the date hereof, appears to have been overlooked, and I shall be glad to have your remittance by return of post, and oblige.
Yours faithfully,
The superfluous
at the date hereof
must have been prompted by a feeling that
now
by itself was not formal enough and needed dressing up. And the word
oblige
is grammatically mid-air. It has no subject, and is firmly cut off by a full stop from what might have been supposed to be its object, the writer’s signature.
The fault of commercialese is that its mechanical use has a bad effect on both writer and reader—the writer’s appreciation of the meaning of words is deadened, and the reader feels that the writer’s approach lacks sincerity.
(12)
Use words with precise meanings rather than vague ones. As we have seen, you will not be doing your job properly unless you make your meaning readily understood: this is an elementary duty. Yet habitual disregard of it is the commonest cause of the abuse and raillery directed against what is called officialese. All entrants into the Civil Service come equipped with a vocabulary of common words of precise meaning adequate for every ordinary purpose. But when the moment arrives for them to write as officials, most have a queer trick of forgetting these words and relying mainly on a smaller vocabulary of less common words with a less precise meaning. It is a curious fact that in the official’s armoury of words the weapons readiest to hand are weapons not of precision but of rough and ready aim. Often, indeed, they are of a sort that were constructed as weapons of precision but have been bored out by the official into blunderbusses. * The blunderbusses have been put in the front rack of the armoury. The official reaches out for a word and uses one of these without troubling to search in the racks behind for one that is more likely to hit the target in the middle.
The blunderbuss
integrate
, for instance, is now kept in front of
join
,
combine
,
amalgamate
,
coordinate
and others, and the hand stretching out for one of these gets no further.
Develop
blocks the way to
happen
,
occur
,
take
With all building work, the owner of the property (or land) in question is ultimately responsible for complying with the relevant planning rules and building regulations (regardless of the need to apply for planning permission and/or building regulations approval or not). ~
Do not allow
per
to get too free with the English language. Such convenient abbreviations as
mph
and
rpm
are no doubt
with us for good. But generally it is well to confine
per
to its own language, e.g.
per cent
,
per capita
,
per contra
, and to avoid writing ‘as
per
my letter’ for ‘as I said in my letter’. Even for phrases in which
per
is linked to a Latin word, there are often English equivalents that serve at least as well, and possibly better. ‘£100 a year’ is more natural than ‘£100
per annum
’, and
per se
does not ordinarily mean anything more than ‘by itself’ or ‘in itself’. Another Latin word better left alone is
re
. This is the ablative case of the Latin word
res
. It means ‘in the matter of’. It is used by lawyers for the title of lawsuits, such as ‘
In re
John Doe deceased’, and has passed into commercialese as an equivalent of the English preposition
about
. It has no business there, or in official writing. It is not needed either in a heading (‘re your application for a permit’), which can stand without its support, or in the body of a letter, where an honest
about
will serve your purpose better.
A correspondent has sent me the following example of the baleful influence of commercialese:
Payment of the above account, which is now overdue at the date hereof, appears to have been overlooked, and I shall be glad to have your remittance by return of post, and oblige.
Yours faithfully,
The superfluous
at the date hereof
must have been prompted by a feeling that
now
by itself was not formal enough and needed dressing up. And the word
oblige
is grammatically mid-air. It has no subject, and is firmly cut off by a full stop from what might have been supposed to be its object, the writer’s signature.
The fault of commercialese is that its mechanical use has a bad effect on both writer and reader—the writer’s appreciation of the meaning of words is deadened, and the reader feels that the writer’s approach lacks sincerity.
(12)
Use words with precise meanings rather than vague ones. As we have seen, you will not be doing your job properly unless you make your meaning readily understood: this is an elementary duty. Yet habitual disregard of it is the commonest cause of the abuse and raillery directed against what is called officialese. All entrants into the Civil Service come equipped with a vocabulary of common words of precise meaning adequate for every ordinary purpose. But when the moment arrives for them to write as officials, most have a queer trick of forgetting these words and relying mainly on a smaller vocabulary of less common words with a less precise meaning. It is a curious fact that in the official’s armoury of words the weapons readiest to hand are weapons not of precision but of rough and ready aim. Often, indeed, they are of a sort that were constructed as weapons of precision but have been bored out by the official into blunderbusses. * The blunderbusses have been put in the front rack of the armoury. The official reaches out for a word and uses one of these without troubling to search in the racks behind for one that is more likely to hit the target in the middle.
The blunderbuss
integrate
, for instance, is now kept in front of
join
,
combine
,
amalgamate
,
coordinate
and others, and the hand stretching out for one of these gets no further.
Develop
blocks the way to
happen
,
occur
,
take
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