Plain Words by Rebecca Gowers

Author:Rebecca Gowers
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780241960356
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2014-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

What, the humble gardener wonders bleakly, are these ‘comprehensive cultural instructions’, and why would a passing interest in crocuses make it seem as though one needed them? Growing would do perfectly well the job that ‘comprehensive cultural’ is supposed to do, where the use of cultural for growing will bring most readers to a momentary halt.

Gowers ended this chapter with a column of seductive or ‘showy’ words that he thought were overworked in official documents. Though he accepted that they all had their proper uses, he warned against the temptation to use them in preference to other words that ‘would convey better the meaning you want to express’. His advice to avoid using moiety for half is probably now obsolete, but the rest of his list still stands. Of the hundred or so words given below, roughly fifty are modern examples that have come into vogue since. (It should be added that one or two of these more recent examples barely qualify as having ‘proper’ uses.) The right-hand column, meanwhile, gives other words, not necessarily synonyms, that might perhaps be used instead, ‘if only, in some cases,’ as Gowers put it, ‘as useful change-bowlers’. ~

Seductive words: Words you might use instead:

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