Mind your language
THE word decision occurs but once in the Bible, and in a fairly decisive con- text, with reference to the Valley of Josaphat, the valley of decision, where the Lord will judge the nations, accord- ing to he prophet Joel. (Oddly enough, Ronald Knox, an old Etonian, in his translation calls this a 'divine audit', which makes it sound like the work of a heavenly accountant.) In current usage, decisions (often `planning decisions') are what other things tend to pend for. But there is, it seems, an exception: when politicians are doing the deciding. Some of my sharp political-observer friends have found that over the past three decades English politicians (perhaps taking their cue from America) have been taking, not making, decisions. This is thought, by them, to add to their reputation for activeness (or even pro-activeness).
It is not easy trace the development of taking a decision. The OED has a fine big article on the verb take, running to more than 30,000 words. Take is, after all, one of the elemental words of the English language, and the OED treats it under 94 different headings. Though it distinguishes to take action (a meaning deeply influenced by mediaeval legal usage), it does not deal with take a deci- sion separately; decision-making and decision-taking are listed indifferently under the word decision. It so happens that the earliest citation for decision- taking is later (in this century) than the earliest for decision-making, but I do not think we can conclude much from that.
If I had the many millions of words on a computerised database that clever men at Oxford have, I might be able to come up with something more, well, decisive.
(By the way, while I was leafing through the 1993 Volume 1 of the Oxford English Dictionary Additions Series, I came upon Squarial, which must hold some sort of place as the most ephemeral word to gain inclusion in the dictionary. The first citation is from the Daily Telegraph for 3 August 1988, and the dish aerial in question went out of production after the merger of British Satellite Broadcasting with Sky television in December 1990. I sometimes wonder if too much effort is invested in rounding up transient tech- nological labels, rather than in improv- ing the treatment of words from earlier centuries.) Anyway, I shall be alert from now on to politicians' claims to be taking deci- sions, as if that were always a laudable kind of grasping the nettle.
Dot Wordsworth
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