Mind your language
PEOPLE WHO devise public announcements are notoriously prolix and artificial as stylists. This is not nec- essarily because they are functionally illiterate. It is because they think this sort of language is nicer, more polite.
An American reader sent me a card reporting, as an example of the tefloni- sation of English, an announcement in an airport departure lounge: 'At this time, will Mrs Wordsworth approach the podium?' I believe it. They would have felt that 'come to the desk' was too crude.
Official notices can also use an artifi- cial register of language as a minatory device. There is a faded board screwed to the wall of Archbishop's House, Westminster, that says: 'If any child is seen disfiguring these walls by drawing or writing upon them, the police will be communicated with by telephone.
`By Order.'
There are a number of joys in this: the passive voice (Is seen', 'will be com- municated with'); the nice distinction (`drawing or writing'); the invocation of new technology (`by telephone'); and the threat of anonymous authority (`By Order'). They don't make 'em like that any more.
Naturally many notices are impera- tive. I used to pass a door in Smithfield bearing the instruction: 'Push this door hard.' It was difficult to resist. Others are surreally ambiguous: 'This machine is alarmed,' it says on a one-armed ban- dit in our local public house.
These days even supermarkets can mend their ways under pressure from us pedants, as when one chain adjusted '8 items or less' to '8 items or fewer'. But I'm not sure that the pleasure of notices isn't the way in which they differ from both ordinary written and oral speech. James (now Jan) Morris was particular- ly pleased by a notice in Queen's Lane, Oxford: `Chars-a-banc not admitted.'
Dot Wordsworth
Previous page
