page_0003

3.

be formal and pedantic. What we call a colloquial style may have a
very firm structure behind it. But once we forget structure, what the
French call ordonnance, then the virtue goes out of our speech. Three
thousand years ago Homer talked about "articulate-speaking men". He
was thinking of certain barbarous and primitive tribes who were not
articulate. Our ancestors in the Stone Age cannot have been articulate.
Their language was probably a fluid, shapeless thing, incapable
of expressing any but the most elementary emotions. So if we cease to
be really articulate, if we let our speech and writing become loose
and shapeless and badly screwed together, then we are losing one of
the chief benefits of civilisation. We are slipping back to barbarism.

I want to suggest to you one or two dangers which beset us
today, and which I think we ought to guard against.

The first is the use of what I call jargon; that is words
and metaphors which have no exact, clear-cut meaning. They may have
been all right at the beginning, but the virtue has gone out of them
now. They have now become empty phrases, mere counters which have
lost the freshness of the living language. You find this in every
profession. It is found in t he correspondence of business men and lawyers;
it is rampant in Blue books and Government reports; it is very
common in the Army, as those of you who served in the War will remember.
In journalism I think the fault comes chiefly from using phrases which
have gone stale and meaningless from constant repetition. For example
- The man who first said that someone was "of the male persuasion"
said something funny, but to repeat it constantly gets on one's nerves.
Why must every foundation be "well and truly laid"? Why must we call
women "the softer sex"? Why must we speak of the body as "the human