Our kind of Brit

Jacob Rees-Mogg, editor

YOU MIGHT recall that the United Kingdom is going through a change of government—again. It happens with some frequency in that parliamentary system. Every time a Cabinet member quits, the government is in danger of falling. Give us tea with ice, real football and regular elections.

One of the new bosses in Boris Johnson’s government is Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Leader of the House of Commons, which means he’s sorta the Speaker of the House over the pond.

After he took office, he sent a guide to his staff about the rules for correspondence from his high office. It appears to be a Reader’s Digest version of an AP Stylebook and bans certain words and phrases, which certainly need banning. The list is making the rounds on the Internet, and the only problem with it might be that it’s much too short.

The honorable (or is that honourable?) member’s list of banned words and phrases include:

Very

Due to

Hopefully

Lot

Speculate

Ascertain

“I am pleased to learn”

“I note your concerns”

Invest (as in schools, etc.)

Hear, hear and bloody good work, what! He also told his staff not to use the word “impact” as a verb unless somebody’s talking about a tooth. This is the kind of English, up with which we’d love to put. Or, as somebody from a different latitude, not to mention longitude, might put it: Bless his heart!

This list of banned words is a good start, if only a start. Ascertain is used when somebody doesn’t want you to ascertain much. Investing—when it comes from a government office—is euphemism for spending. And yes, yes, let’s all get rid of the word “very” in our copy. Mark Twain once suggested to a writer to replace all the “verys” in his prose with “damns” instead. Then his editor would be sure to take out all the “damns” before publication, and, Mr. Twain assured, the writer’s work would be greatly improved.

Oh, the abuses of the common language that separates the United Kingdom and the United States. We’d call it

the Facebooking of the vernacular, but the abuse has been around longer than friending. (Besides, if we coined the word Facebooking, it would defeat the purpose.)

The next person who uses the word “incentivize” should have his sports talk radio show canceled. The word “task” is a perfectly good noun, but just another pretentious verb. The next suit who says we should be multi-tasking might get a couple of words in response— words that actually exist.

And whenever we hear somebody start a sentence with To Be Honest, we think: This is a clue to when this person is being honest or frank. So we conclude that he’s not being honest otherwise.

We don’t know where/when/how using nouns as verbs became popular, but if another writer around here says we should “gift” our moms with flowers soon, we’re going to throttle him, her, or it. Nobody footballs their mom, or Ernest Borgnines their mom, so who first decided to use the word “gift” in this horrible way? Gift is a noun. Use it such.

(Some words can be both noun and verb, and quite properly so. For example: film, fish, paint, supply. But “gift” isn’t one of them. Or certainly shouldn’t be. Any more than “impact” should.)

You can also use leverage, but you can’t leverage, no matter what your job at the bank or investment house. Your Army unit might have had its headquarters at Fort Sill, but it wasn’t headquartered there. And nobody “guests” at another person’s house.

FOR ALL that is holy, Americans should effort this. It may be too late to save corporate America, but the rest of us could still learn from Jacob Rees-Mogg’s editing techniques, sparse though they are at this early point. If he’d like to expand his list of off-putting and insufferable bits of language, we’ve got a large file that we could mail him. The postage for the weight of the thing, however, might break his new government.

But we do appreciate his trying. Unfortunately, like our squalling and caterwauling against these linguistic trends and heresies, we’re not sure how much good it will do.

For as a wise man, Clarence Darrow, once said, even if you do learn to speak correct English, whom are you going to speak it to?