I thought in loco parentis* meant ‘my dad’s an engine driver’. But I adore the variety of our language

WE WERE taught Latin at school, but I didn’t learn much. For years, I thought ‘in loco parentis’ meant ‘my dad’s an engine driver’. That said, I love the richness and diversity of the English language, which includes words borrowed and adapted from every language under the sun.

American philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson described the English language as a great river into which so many tributaries have flowed. Among those tributaries are French, Latin, Greek, Indian, Icelandic and German. It’s that variety that makes our language so rich, and some of the words and phrases that we are being encouraged to avoid are there simply because they express something clearly.

Vis-a-vis, for example, now means something a bit different from its literal translation of face-toface. You can find an English formulation that avoids using the French phrase, but you can also ask people to take on board and own these ‘foreign’ phrases.

We want to be inclusive, and we don’t want to alienate anyone, but our language is international and some of these Latin tags and socalled foreign phrases are useful.

Everyone knows what a CV is. I think it’s interesting that the letters stand for curriculum vitae, and I’m not sure how useful it is to substitute something else for CV.

I am in favour of people increasing, not diminishing, their vocabulary. Yes, we want people to be able to understand one another, but I am rather against banning anything.

The great Dr Samuel Johnson wanted to stop the use of the word bamboozle, and that’s one of my favourite words. So rather than banning words and phrases, let’s instead teach people what they mean and how to use them.

* For readers who may have dozed off in the odd Latin lesson, in loco parentis means ‘in the place of a parent’, such as the duty of care a teacher has towards a pupil.