What Jacob Rees-Mogg's language rules reveal about him
Jacob Rees-Mogg must be in seventh heaven right now. His obsession with anachronistic rules and rituals finally has a professional justification. Boris Johnson has made him leader of the House of Commons, a British institution more steeped in arcane ritual than almost any other. He even has a bonus title, Lord President of the Council, complete, no doubt, with complicated modes of address. I’m sure he’s checked the entry in Debrett’s and will be correcting anyone who gets it wrong.
Because he’s a stickler for that kind of thing: it emerged at the end of last week that he has a list of banned words and style rules that he asks members of staff to apply in written communication. (How he polices oral communication is unknown. One thing I would say: it’s probably best to avoid asking him where the toilet is.)
We all have style preferences, and there’s nothing wrong with expressing them – as long as you don’t claim they’re the only “correct” way of doing things. But the words and phrases Rees-Mogg has singled out are revealing, if not exactly surprising.
Esq.
Among his recommendations, Rees-Mogg asks that “all non-titled males” are given the abbreviation Esq., for esquire, after their name. Esquire is a pretty outmoded honorific that technically designates a man below the rank of a knight. It derives from the Latin scutarius, meaning “shield bearer”, and entered English via the Old French escuier. There’s almost something egalitarian about the fact that Rees-Mogg wants everyone to get a whiff of aristocracy, even if they don’t have a dukedom or whatnot. But then you remember that there is, of course, no female equivalent.
Hopefully
And now for the banned words. Since the 17th century “hopefully” has been used as an adverb, modifying a verb to suggest that the action is done “in a hopeful way”. For example, you might say: “He asked for some more food, hopefully.” Since roughly the second half of the 20th century more and more people have used it to modify whole sentences, to mean “it is hoped that”. So, “hopefully it won’t rain tomorrow” (though there’s evidence that this goes back to at least the 18th century). In any case, it’s now completely normal. Rees-Mogg is evidently one of those who detests this hopefully as a hideous innovation. But the fact he doesn’t specify that it’s sentential “hopefully” he’s worried about shows he already recognises it is the standard usage. As elsewhere, the world has moved on but he hasn’t.
Equal
This is a bit mystifying, as it’s not a word generally disparaged in old-fashioned style guides. Could it be that Rees-Mogg sees it as redolent of various politically correct catchphrases, like equal opportunities, equal rights or (probably his biggest bugbear) equal marriage, which he voted against on seven separate occasions?
Got
There are a couple of ways of indicating possession in English, namely “have” and “have got”: “I have a cat” vs “I’ve got a cat”. The latter is usually judged to be slightly less formal, which is presumably why Rees-Mogg hates it. But the ban appears to be a blanket one: got is cast out even where it’s just the past tense of the innocent verb get (as in “he got me a present”). This is strange, since get, as the linguist John McWhorter pointed out in a recent episode of his podcast, is a hugely important part of the lexical scaffolding of English. Does Rees-Mogg feel it’s been contaminated by association with the informal “have got” construction? Does it just sound a bit too “common”?
Meet with
The usual objection to “meet with” is that the preposition is redundant. “I met with Juncker” and “I met Juncker”, is it argued, mean the same thing, so it’s foolish to add the “with” (god help you if you say “met up with”). Except that redundancy is a natural and ubiquitous feature of English and of most languages. Does Rees-Mogg also object to “sit down”?
Due to
Some believe that “due to” should only modify a noun, behaving in the same way as “attributable to” would. Thus, you can say “the loss was due to his poor performance” but not “he lost due to his poor performance”. In the latter case, traditionalists say, you must use “because of”. But because of and due to are used interchangeably by the vast majority of native speakers of English. And our only meaningful guide to how words work is how most people use them (ask the compilers of the Oxford English Dictionary). In what sense is a distinction a distinction if hardly anyone recognises it?
It’s interesting to ponder why ReesMogg feels the sting of these “mistakes” so keenly. In fact, some work has been done on the personality traits of people who get irritated by what they perceive to be grammatical errors. They score highly on measures of conscientiousness. What does that mean? As one researcher puts it: “A high score on conscientious implies strong industriousness, impulse control, dutifulness, sense of organisation, adherence to norms and rules and a preference for order and dependability.” Although that doesn’t predict a highly conservative outlook, it’s certainly compatible with it. It also squares with the so-called authoritarian personality type that was most likely to vote Brexit and features “a strong desire for order, obedience, conformity”.
So Rees-Mogg’s hidebound rules are exactly what you’d expect from a man on the rightmost reaches of a rightwing party. The only question is whether his love of order is compatible with the nodeal Brexit he’s pushing. Hopefully, we won’t have to find out.
• David Shariatmadari is a Guardian editor and writer. His book Don’t Believe A Word: The Surprising Truth About Language is out in August