Simply English by Simon Heffer

Author:Simon Heffer [Simon Heffer]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House
Published: 2014-05-08T04:00:00+00:00

J

Jail and gaol Jail is the American spelling of the word for a prison, but has superseded the traditional gaol, which is now considered archaic.

Jargon Each sub-tribe in society perpetuates its own jargon, which is always a handicap to widespread communication. Jargon is a word that originally meant ‘the inarticulate utterance of birds, or a vocal sound resembling it’. It has come metaphorically to be ‘applied contemptuously to any mode of speech abounding in unfamiliar terms, or peculiar to a particular set of persons’. One has an insight into this when overhearing the conversation of members of the medical profession or the Bar, or when reading their learned journals; or, at another extreme, when listening to conversation between members of the army or former professional sportsmen who now act as commentators on television. Some jargon, however, in time passes into everyday use thanks to the layman’s exposure to it through media such as television and the press.

Sir Ernest Gowers, a senior civil servant and therefore a man exposed regularly to jargon of a peculiar sort, raised objections to elements of it in his book Plain Words in 1948: yet his dissatisfaction with words such as multilateral, bilateral and unilateral cannot now hold. It is not just that they are ubiquitous, for that does not make them right: it is that they are in fact clear, and serve a comprehensible function. Equally, just as some words change over time from being abstruse to being common, others change from terms of abuse to badges of honour (as both Whig and Tory did), and one needs to decide at what stage in their development some words are before one uses them. Writing is all about judgement, and if one wishes to remain formal one will know by experience and often by instinct what vocabulary, or argot, has a place in such writing and what does not. Jargon is also a close cousin of CLICHÉ, and one should be alert to the insidious way in which the jargon of officials seeps into the language of the general public – recent examples include phrases such as ‘blue-skies thinking’ (or ‘blue-skies’ anything, for that matter) and ‘best practice’.

Jewelry is the American spelling of jewellery.

Journalese is a pejorative term, coined at the time of the rise of the cheap or ‘yellow’ press in Britain in the 1880s, to describe what was thought to be the demotic variant of English in which cheap newspapers addressed their readers. Insofar as it survives today, it is sometimes apparent in what are widely known as the ‘red tops’. While direct and clear, it is not a form of prose that should be imitated by anyone outside the genre who aspires to seriousness in writing. See TABLOID PRESS.

Judgement is the correct British spelling: judgment an Americanism. The same distinction is true of ACKNOWLEDGEMENT and ABRIDGEMENT.

Judicial language, American British English is becoming increasingly littered with phrases familiar from the televising of American police or legal dramas but that have no legitimate place in

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.