Words and Stuff
One piece of collateral damage that I never expected of Brexit was the injury inflicted on ‘deliver’. Somehow ‘deliver’, an unpretentious friend of long standing, has become tied to the dreadful neologism ‘Brexit’. In the mouths of politicians, at least, it has become impossible to utter ‘Brexit’ without first saying ‘deliver’. For me, the pairing is not quite like love and marriage, nor even a horse and carriage. It is vile.
Emerging from Latin and Old French into Middle English, ‘deliver’ has been fixed in our vocabulary by constant repetition of the entreaty in the Lord’s Prayer to ‘deliver us from evil’. As with so many words and phrases in the King James Bible and the Prayer Book, familiarity has brought affection, not contempt. Shakespeare used ‘deliver’ in his plays about 200 times, in one form or another, but seldom memorably: my edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Quotations has no entry from anything except the Bible or the Prayer Book.
‘Deliver’ has had its moments. The 1972 film Deliverance was certainly memorable, though perhaps as much for its violence as for its brilliance. More enjoyable was Tom Jones in 1963, and in particular the riposte of Edith Evans, playing Miss Western, when confronted by a highwayman with a pistol: ‘Stand and deliver? I am no travelling midwife!’
That was a reminder that ‘deliver’ has more than one meaning: to relieve you of something, notably a baby, as Miss Western reminded her attacker, or simply to ‘hand over’, which was what he had been getting at. But its primary meaning is to set people free from something, which is ‘evil’ in the Lord’s Prayer but might be the European Union, if you regard that as an oppressive institution.
Over the years, the meanings have expanded. ‘Rescue’, ‘disburden’, ‘discharge’, ‘launch’, ‘give forth’, ‘cast’, ‘throw’, ‘declare’ and ‘pronounce’ have followed. And the ‘handing over’ meaning has developed to give ‘deliver’ a useful role in the matter of distribution. Its grammatical object has become anything from water (1633) to letters (1881) to bills (1892). In the 20th century, Bertie Wooster likened the sound of his collision with a grandfather clock to that of the ‘delivery of several tons of coal through the roof of a conservatory’. In 1950s grocers’ shops, it is said, notices cautioned customers, ‘Please don’t sit on the bacon-slicer, otherwise we get behind in our deliveries.’
Those meanings of my old friend are now all but overwhelmed by ‘deliver on’, frequently used to mean ‘keep’ or ‘honour’ a promise, and what might be called the Brexit ‘deliver’. This use of ‘deliver’, which actually predates ‘Brexit’, was never attractive: a typical example is ‘Glasgow Life delivers world-class museums, major events and sports facilities’. The word is widely and lazily used; politicians like it chiefly, I think, because for them ‘deliver’ shares with ‘Brexit’ the quality of allowing almost any meaning you want to give it. It is thickly coated with opacity and fudge.
To my surprise, those characteristics were being praised the other day by Lord Sumption, a former justice of the Supreme Court. In his second Reith Lecture he remarked that imprecision and ambiguity can often be useful in settling disputes. I’d make that ‘occasionally’ rather than ‘often’, but he’s right in implying that we shouldn’t criticise politicians for practising the art of the possible, nor rob them of their tools. We can and should, however, criticise them for the poverty of their language, their readiness to regurgitate clichés, the banality of their utterances and, yes, their use of words chosen for opacity and fudge. Thanks to their love of inexactitude, ‘Brexit’, devoid of a clear meaning on which all can agree, is now joined by ‘deliver’ in empty ambiguity.