End sun heat and winter rage anxiety.
The above line belongs unmistakably to the twentieth century. I have taken the famous lines of Shakespeare
Fear no more the heat of the sun
Nor the furious winter’s rages
and translated them into a style which we meet all too often today. The first characteristic of this style is that we have to read through to the full stop before we know what it is all about; we realize at last that what Imogen has to end is neither sun, heat, winter, nor rage, but anxiety, so that each of the first four nouns is not a noun at all but an adjective. It is the sun-heat kind of anxiety that has to be ended. Thus the sentence is rather like the Latin and Greek passages that some of us had to translate in our youth. They were puzzles in which we had first to search for the main verb, then for the subject and the object; but puzzling as they were, they were easy by the standards of some English writers of our own day. The second characteristic is the avoidance of active verbs. Shakespeare here used the powerful word fear, but our modem writer uses instead the abstract noun anxiety for the main word in the sentence, and the verb that remains (end) has little content.
The English style which I am discussing here is widespread outside the literary world, and is extending its empire year by year. It is established in large areas of technology, journalism, and officialdom. In spite of this last reference, this article is not meant at all to be an attack on officialese with its empty phrases; this has been amply done elsewhere, by none better than Gowers.1 Officialese is perennial and is not a serious threat. But winter rage anxiety belongs only to our own time. While nobody of any sensitivity would use this particular expression, it will serve to illustrate my present theme.
Using long strings of nouns and using abstract nouns rather than verbs—these are twin vices; the first vice sets the reader a puzzle and the second dulls the meaning. The habit that has grown during this century is the use of the noun-as-adjective or double noun (welfare state) which expands into the multiple noun (welfare state university, winter rage anxiety). Perhaps this habit has invaded the language by way of the headlines of our daily newspapers. We may excuse it in a headline, which must fit inelastic type into a small space, but we need not excuse it elsewhere.
The English language contains many nouns made up of two words like football and boatrace, which we feel as one word. The same process leads to double nouns, whether short like bus stop or long like government department. When these double nouns refer to things, and especially when they are short, they are harmless and may be necessary. When they become multiple, with three or four nouns in a row, and especially when they are abstract, they become obnoxious. This is partly because the abstract is usually vague and weak and could better be translated to yield an active verb, partly because the multiple noun sets a problem to the reader; we do not know which word qualifies which, and we may take some seconds to sort the sentence out.
A few more examples are needed. While I have long watched for additions to my collection, I have never found a better exhibit than that of Gowers: ‘A large vehicle fleet operator mileage restriction has now been made imperative.’ This bundle of nouns is characteristic of the disease. Which noun qualifies which? Which does large qualify? After a few false starts one can work out that a restriction has been made imperative; beyond that everything is vague.
We might ponder on that horror of the 1960s: credibility gap. This expression would not have been thought of in an earlier generation. Consider an ordinary man’s reaction to a government like the American one of the time: ‘You can’t believe a word they say’; or perhaps, ‘They even seem proud of telling lies’—and note that the active believe has been demoted to the abstract credibility. And gap is just the wrong word; there was a lack of credibility, not a gap in credibility. Or perhaps (as so often with these double nouns) it means something different after all.
To quote an example from more reputable sources. A study was recently made of why employees who are honest in other situations will cheat or pilfer from their employers; such dishonesty is commoner than most of us realize. Many of the culprits say that they steal not because they need the goods or the cash, but because it makes life more exciting; and their chiefs in turn, when they catch them, may decide not to punish them, because they are valuable members of staff and the firm can stand the annual loss. They steal for the excitement of it, as a change from humdrum existence. But that is not how this story appeared in the columns of Search, where we read ‘Z. found that job enrichment was the chief motive behind employee theft.’
Note, by the way, how typically vague these double nouns are. Life enrichment would be better than job enrichment (since the job itself remained dull), while employee theft at first seems to mean theft of an employee by a rival, rather than theft by an employee.
We should reject the excuse that this device saves space. The addicts of the multiple noun are diffuse writers, and if one takes a paragraph from their writing and works out or guesses the probable meaning, one can rewrite it in normal English and at less length. It is anyway a poor excuse for a man who has trodden on a reader’s toes to say that he was in a hurry. We should insist that the multiple noun is above all ill-mannered.
One valid excuse applies to a small area of our worlds best exemplified by mechanical novelties. Someone invents or builds a new kind of thing and needs a name for it. He may go to Greek for it (as with cyclotron); but that means an unusual effort, only to be made for something special. For the run-of-the-mill gadget, he uses a multiple noun like battery discharger test set. We might listen to a spokesman for this kind of expression, one D. McNeill, in the American weekly Science (13 May 1966). His article, ‘Speaking of Space’, describes especially the jargon of the engineers on the space project. He says that multiple nouns are needed for their gadgets and gives rules for their construction. He gives what he believes to be analogies from everyday English to justify his usage. Unfortunately he picks them all wrong—they are not analogies; his first two are vending machine (but this vending is an ordinary adjective, a machine that vends) and girl friend (a girl-who-is-a-friend, a noun in apposition, which is not like battery discharger, a thing-that-discharges-a-battery). He frankly admits that multiple nouns are difficult to understand; but it would be fairer to quote this admission in his own words: ‘Whereas transformation of a phrase [i.e., forming a multiple noun] is unique, retransformation of a compound [i.e., translation into English] is often ambiguous….It is for the encoder of terms, not the decoder, that this grammatical device is advantageous.’ He will not allow that the habit is due to carelessness, because he has found far more of it in writing than in speech. (I think it is the first rule of good writing that you should hear yourself saying it; evidently McNeill and I disagree here). Finally he tells us ‘[The multiple noun] can be a source of borrowed dignity for any professional jargon’.
We may accept the case for what may be only a temporary need, since if the gadget is much used it will soon have its own short name. But I am dealing here not with gadgets but with expressions like job enrichment and employee theft. So after this digression we come back to the general case. Does anything lie behind all this?
One important reason for using multiple nouns as well as abstract nouns is that the people who use these forms are shy about using any forthright words at all, so they avoid verbs—active verbs. This extends even to contexts where a verb must be used and where they choose one that sounds and feels like a noun. It is nicer to their ears, more delicate, to loan someone a dollar than to lend it. Both these words are in the dictionary as verbs; but lend is just a verb and sounds like it, while loan has the feel of a noun, and is therefore less frank. Again, what you do with a seed is to sow it. But sow looks and sounds four-letterish—it is terribly frank—so the American seeds his crop of wheat. (Better perhaps than some Australians who plant their wheat without a smile). Similarly we meet to pressure, instead of to press, and even to proposition instead of to propose.
The verb is not the only part of speech to suffer. The adjective is also under attack. Call as our first witness the term high-fidelity applied to a record. Why not faithful? Faithful sounds and feels genuine; it is exactly what is meant. The ugly pentasyllable invented by the industry says not a whit more than faithful does. While we ought not always to take sides with the native word against the imported, we should still note that the simple adjective is English and the industry’s word fidelity is Latin.
I believe that the inventor of high-fidelity felt shy about using the English adjective; like lend and press, it is too frank. The abstract noun is vaguer, less compromising. High, to the eyes and ears of our opponents, is no longer an adjective; it just means that the coming abstract noun is positive and not negative. This is perfectly shown by high-rise flats. The people who devised this name would not even understand us if we called them just high. (‘High what? High-economy flats? High- accessibility flats? High-desirability flats? Yours is not a high-clarity statement’). So we get a high-transparency liquid for a transparent liquid, high-density instead of dense, and so on.
I have punctuated my exhibits in the way I like, with a hyphen. But some editors would abolish the hyphen. There are fashions in punctuation, and the current fashion is to cut everything except full stops. Here is another step on the downward path, and it belongs more closely to what has gone before than one might guess. The job of the hyphen is to tell us which word belongs to which, and so to save the reader from wasting a few seconds in solving a puzzle. With the hyphen in place, we know at once that rise is a noun-as-adjective. Without it, we would have to work it out. (What are rise flats? Oh no, he doesn’t mean that—begin again). So we meet such puzzles as a heavier than air machine or large company owned mines.
Some years ago I devised a simple formula which correlated pretty well with the readability both of technical articles and of articles dealing with ideas. Count one point for every abstract noun, add one for every double noun and three for every triple noun; divide the total by the number of active verbs. (The empty words is and occurs do not count, and passive verbs do not count). Any ratio over three is rather bad. My earlier exhibit, Job enrichment was the chief motive behind employee theft, counts three for abstracts (enrichment, motive, theft), one each for the double nouns, and zero for active verbs: progress score, 5/0. My own score in the succeeding paragraph I make 14/14, with a ratio 1.0. I have not detected any article in Meanjin which exceeds two.
Should we try to save the situation? As English becomes increasingly the world’s language, we who inherit it as our mother tongue have an added responsibility to save it from degradation. The issue here is not one of resistance to every change. In every generation new words are bom or are promoted from slang, while established words fade away or shift in meaning. One may welcome some of these changes, feel neutral about others, and regret still others. If we regret, it is with no more than a shrug. I would rather have seen disinterested keep its one-time meaning of impartial than become just the same as uninterested; but life is full of minor bereavements, and our language is not threatened because odd words here and there fall prey to the less educated. Most of the pleas that have been made for preserving our language have been over words like these. But that is not the issue here. I am concerned with the domination of sentences by abstract nouns and double or multiple nouns; this is a very different matter, since it threatens the clarity of our language.
When one realizes that a nasty influence or trend is at work in our society, one may either fight it, or note and record it and otherwise do nothing. For members of the second group there is ample material for cheap Ph.Ds and for academic promotion in tracing the growth of multiple nouns, nouns-as-adjectives and nouns-as-adverbs, and the disappearance of necessary hyphens during the past fifty years. (Planners of such a programme would shudder at my almost obscene frankness in that word cheap, and would substitute low time and work expense Ph.Ds). But whether or not they are interested in working such a goldmine, they regard it as futile to oppose a trend—worse than futile, positively wrong and shameful. They would tell us that this would be to oppose the forces of history, which work on a higher plane than mere individuals. They would say it would be like trying to turn back the tide—a curious simile to pick, since only a few hours after a high tide the land is back in human occupation. This code of finding what is the fashionable trend and following it has aptly been named by Karl Popper moral futurism—that is, the doctrine that the moral code that will be in force in the year 2000 must be superior to that of the 1970s and that we should therefore practise it now. It is a quaint argument, since if we act now their prophecy may be wrong. It is quaint in other ways; consider, for instance, the present trend towards armed robberies and dirty air in cities.
George Orwell asked himself this very question—can anything be done to save a language?—in an essay2 for which I have always been grateful, ‘Politics and the English Language’. He deals at the start with an imagined opponent’s gibe that it is foolish and sentimental to try to halt an evil, when that evil is happening just because our lives are corrupt; he rejects this gibe, since some of the corruption is the result of messy thinking, and if by better use of our language we think more lucidly, then we may halt the corruption, too.
The argument that because a trend exists it must be right may have irrational sources. But we should consider a rational argument for welcoming change (though it does not apply here.) We are often told how the masses of ordinary folk in the rough-and-tumble of everyday living will round off the edges of words and shape the language ever more fittingly to their needs. We may be reminded of how the English language, milling around among the lower orders before and after the Norman Conquest, turned eventually from the complex inflected Anglo-Saxon into the uninflected (or scarcely inflected) form that Chaucer used. We should feel grateful to the lower orders of those ancient days; they did it, not the literary classes. We might look at similar changes close to our own time, when it has become all right to say thrived instead of throve or thriven. Should we also look with approval to the (hypothetical) day next century when it is acceptable to say He never done it?
I would like to make a strong distinction between this uneducated usage and the multiple noun which is the subject of this article. I am on the conservative side in sticking to He didn’t do it. Yet I can imagine myself in a situation where for the sake of politeness I would say He never done it; thousands of schoolboys today are bilingual in just that way, with one language for peers and another for parents. But I cannot imagine myself, in any situation short of the rack, saying Job enrichment is the motive behind employee theft. If we come to use only one word for the past forms of do as we use only one word for the past of think and look and say, nothing has been lost, and some egalitarians may even cheer the disappearance of a class distinction. But if we accept the multiple noun and fail to give the simple active verb its place, our language will have become obscure. Job enrichment is not the sort of expression that the lower orders developed in Norman times, nor is it the sort that mills around among the masses today. It comes from a different section of society—from people with substantial education but without sensitivity to language.
Thus there is no case for surrender. Many books and periodicals still appear which avoid the multiple noun and use the English that we have long known. Two languages exist side by side. Many writers and editors are doing what conformists tell them they must not do—namely, refusing to comply with a trend. We should continue to have courage and resist ugliness and obscurity. The plight of English is not hopeless; we can still prevent the other language from occupying any more territory than it holds today.
Notes
- E. Gowers, The Complete Plain Words (H.M.S.O. 1954; Penguin Books 1963).
- George Orwell’s essay appeared first in Horizon, April 1946, and later in Shooting an Elephant and other Essays (Seeker and Warburg, 1950) and The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell, Vol. 4 (Seeker and Warburg 1968; Penguin Books 1970).
