Oxford Guide to Plain English: How English Conversation Works by Martin Cutts

Author:Martin Cutts [Crystal, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192583086
Publisher: OxfordUP
Published: 2020-02-03T00:00:00+00:00

English is a greedy and mongrel language enriched for centuries by hundreds of direct borrowings like caravan, trek, graffiti, bastard, clan, crag, criterion, phenomenon, slogan, corgi, garage, and armada, and thousands of foreign-derived words such as plant, fantasy, custom, interest, jury, mutton, bungalow, and tea. The larger dictionaries show the foreign roots of many of our words, with perhaps 70 per cent having Latin or Greek ancestry. Plenty of them are easy and widely understood—they’re part of the plain-English lexicon.

A few terms have kept some of their strangeness but are surely plain English now. In this group are vice versa, which saves several words of explanation (though the other way round may sometimes do), per cent, and etc. Curriculum vitae seems likely to endure as CV—the best alternative in American English is the French résumé, while in South East Asia the pleasing biodata is widespread and New Zealanders tend towards merely bio. The term ad hoc usefully fills a niche in phrases like ad hoc group, and nothing else says it better—but if it were tested among the population, I doubt it would be widely understood.

Terms like e.g., i.e., per annum, per capita, and per diem still cause confusion for a mass audience. Certainly, i.e. and e.g. are concise but fewer people can now distinguish between them because schools rarely teach Latin—so the English equivalents are safer. Times have certainly changed since 1939, when Mind the Stop, a book on punctuation by G V Carey, began:

In writing this book I have had more especially in mind three classes of readers: those who, professionally or otherwise, are faced with the task of reading proofs; those who at school are learning to write English correctly (and perhaps a few of their teachers, quorum pars parva fui); and those ordinary folk—I have met plenty—who remark somewhat vaguely ‘I know nothing about punctuation.’

Most authors today would give a translation of the Latin phrase—it means of which I was once one. In 1999, the BBC dropped its award-winning science series QED because few viewers understood the title or its scientific connection. The BBC’s head of science told the Daily Record: ‘It’s not surprising that the audience didn’t have the faintest idea what it meant.’ The series was reborn as Living Proof, though its disappearance soon after suggests that the obscure title may not have been its only shortcoming.

Uncommon foreign-language terms won’t be well understood, so unless you’re sure of your audience, it’s best to avoid those words and phrases often seen in the literary-review pages like oeuvre, homage, Bildungsroman, noir, fin de siècle, grandes horizontales, femme fatale, and auteur. The news pages of popular dailies will rarely use such terms as casus belli, modus operandi, and glasnost because they will not be understood. Words of foreign origin relating to dress, decoration or religious practice such as hijab, jilbab, burka, niqab, patka, bindi, kohl, kippah, yarmulke, kosher, shalwar kameez, halal, and haram are slowly becoming better understood in the wider UK population. In essential information, though, foreign-language terms are best omitted, or explained in words or pictures.

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