No quibbles
Alan Watkins
New Words for Old Philip Howard (Hamish Hamilton E3.95) 'Words', Evelyn Waugh wrote in A Little Learning, 'have basic inalienable meanings, departure from which is either conscious metaphor or inexcusable vulgarity.' This is an approach to language commonly found in those who are scholars of or have dabbled in the Classics. Mr Howard, unlike Waugh, read the subject at university. His general view is similar to Waugh's but he is rather more tolerant.
'Our mongrelism,' he writes, 'is a source of linguistic as well as of national strength. At the same time we should not have a policy of entirely unrestricted linguistic immigration. An alien word should have a work permit to prove that it is going to do a job not already being done by a native, before it is allowed to settle.'
I do not much care for the extended immigration-metaphor but let that pass. Mr Howard's line is clear enough. His book consists of forty-three articles which originally appeared in The Times, He has not simply reprinted them but added to them to take account of the views of critics and correspondents. He is I think a good thing. We should all care about words and their proper use. And though he occasionally displays a fourth leaderish tendency towards whimsy and archness, he is always readable.
Unhappily he is in fundamental error. Words — at any rate the more important Words — do not have 'correct', basic or Inalienable meanings. This is so not because of the accretion of metaphor or the sanctification of changed usage. Nor is it because of the necessity (scarcely recognised by Mr Howard) for stipulative definition in the natural sciences and other exact undertakings. It is because there is a genuine dispute about the way in which words ought properly to be employed. Sometimes these disputes turn out to be misunderstandings which can be cleared up; at other times not. But they are not quibbles: 'we are discussing no trivial subject, but how a man should live' (Plato, The Republic).
Take, for example, free. Someone may say to me: I am not free to go to Paris because I haven't got any money. I may .reply: I can see your difficulty but you're still perfectly free to go. After all, no one is stopping you. In the same fashion there is no one 'correct' meaning for sovereign in the question, Who is the sovereign power in Great Britain? There are several more or less correct answers that can be given according as one is thinking of the formal, the legal, the political or the real sovereign power. Mr Howard may say at this point, perhaps with some justification, that he is exposing sloppiness and 'pretension, not writing a work of linguistic analysis or political theory. Nevertheless serious matters deserve to be dealt with seriously. He does not, to be sure, make out that the business is easy: but nor is it, as he seems to think, simply a matter of possessing a serviceable dictionary and an acquaintance with Latin and Greek. Certainly imprecision, affectation and modishness ought to be isolated and denounced. But I am not sure that insensitivity is not a worse crime than any of them. Some years ago, for instance, Sir Ernest Gowers attacked an official who said that victims of flood were being given alternative accommodation. Gowers would have preferred the official to say that they were being put into other houses. He was gently corrected by that invaluable guide G.H. Vallins. Alternative accommodation, Vallins wrote, was Precisely what the unfortunate people were being given.
Mr Howard too has prejudices. Several times he writes that stance means position and must not be used by extension to mean attitude or opinion. But stance does not mean quite the same as position. 'Boycott took up his position at the wicket' is not so precise a sentence as `B took up his stance at the wicket'. In the former he may have been loafing around at the bowler's end, leaning on his bat, gazing into space and neglecting to run when called upon to do so. Position need mean no more than the spot where someone is standing. Stance comprehends the way in which he is standing. Moreover it has overtones of fortitude, of defiance, of Lutheran 'Here I stand . . . ' What's your stance on coloured immigration? Well, unlike you I haven't got what you'd call a stance really, more a general attitude. This seems to me a wholly precise and sensible way of speaking.
Sometimes the prejudice is of social, political or academic origin. Mr A.J.P. Taylor tells us in an essay on Lloyd George that The Times Guide to the House of Commons c 1920 distinguished between schoolmaster and schoolteacher. The former was used of masters at public schools, the latter of those at State schools. I cannot but suspect that Mr Howard's aversion to student owes more to dislike or disapproval of the phenomenon itself than to any concern for linguistic purity or propriety. A student, after all, is no more than someone who studies, as with 'A Student of Politics', who used to write his pseudonymous column in the Sunday Times and of whom Mr Bernard Levin remarked, 'About time that lad took his finals', With the Robbins expansion the number of students increased. Simultaneously secondary education changed. An adolescent at a sixth form college is no longer a schoolboy or girl. Hor she is not treated as such. The institution is not a school; is not organised as one. We can I suppose say tht people who attend these and similar places are pupils. But one can be a pupil at a kindergarten. What on earth is wrong with student, even though those involved may be between sixteen and nineteen? Milton went up to Christ's when he was fifteen.
Mr Howard is equally misguided and misleading about research. Up to a point, of course, he is right. Television companies employ young women with names like Angela or Fiona as 'researchers'. Their principal, indeed sole, function seems to be to pester political correspondents with elementary and at the same time lengthy inquiries about the present state of affairs. Nor do they pay for the information, if any, so obtained. But it is quite another matter to assert as Mr Howard does that 'research is properly done by brighter postgraduates and their seniors, not by postgraduates and their juniors'. Here the snobbery of age marches hand in hand with the snobbery of the university. Research surely depends on the nature and quality of what is done rather than on the age and status of those who do it. Thus a City policeman did some excellent research on Jack the Ripper and published his findings in a book.
Prejudice can work the other way too; for as well as against, Mr Howard disapproves of psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, students. He is, however, indulgent towards theologians and metaphysicians — an indulgence I regret I cannot share. He says Sir Harold Wilson was, in the clause IV controversy of 1959-60, wrong to say 'let us unite on policy, not divide on theology'. But Sir Harold was in my view wholly justified. For compare the Labour Party with the Church of England. Very few churchgoers are interested in or know anything about theology. Most clergymen share this lack both of interest and of knowledge. Still there is a subject called theology which has its devotees and scholars in the universities and elsewhere; even in the Church itself.
So with the Labour Party. There is a recognised subject — a corpus of knowledge, doctrine and dogma — which may without impropriety or strain be called Labour theology. Most of it, admittedly, is pretty unalluring stuff, but then, so is theology proper. Much of it is concerned with procedure: not just the Party Constitution but the even more intractable Model Rules for Constituency Parties. There are frequent references to arcane and now forgotten historical disputes: Crossman-Padley, the origins of the TFeasureship, the precise nature of the Deputy Leadership (comparable in some respects to the Trinitarian controversies). Some of us dabble in these matters. Others are genuine scholars. Let not Mr Howard tell us, in his hobnailed, literal way, that we are not engaged in high questions of theology!
On page 83 Mr Howard makes none take a plural verb. On pages 89 and 96 he employs either. . or where more than two are involved. On page xiv he uses sensational where he means spectacular: sensational should surely be kept for sensations. Well, none of us is perfect. Or, if we want to be clever, and show that rules can be broken, we are none of us perfect.
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