Free Plain Words by Rebecca Gowers

will go. The fight for admission to the language is quickly won by some assailants, but long resistance is maintained against others. The word that excited Swift to greatest fury was
mob
, a contraction of
mobile vulgus
. Its victory was rapid and complete. So was that of
banter
and
bamboozle
, which he found hardly less offensive. And if
rep
for
reputation
has never quite risen above being slang, and
phiz
for
physiognomy
is now dead, that is not because Swift denounced them, but because public opinion did not fully embrace them.
    Some words gatecrash irresistibly because their sound is so appropriate to the meaning they are trying to acquire.
Gatecrash
is itself an example. It comes from America and has only been in the language since the 1930s. We still have defenders of our tongue who scrutinise such words, condemning them as undesirables. But we ought not to forget how greatly our language has been enriched by the ebullient word-making habit of the Americans. Acquisitions of the past few decades include
debunk
,
commuter
,
cold war
,
nifty
,
babysitter
,
stockpile
,
bulldoze
,
teenager
,
traffic jam
,
underdog
and many others. I do not see why people should turn up their noses at words that usefully fill a gap. These things are a matter of taste, but one’s own taste is of no importance unless it happens to reflect the general.
    Reliable
was long opposed on the curious ground that it was an impossible construction; an adjective formed from
rely
could only be
reli-on-able
. I remember noticing as a junior in the India Office many years ago that the Secretary of State struck it out of a draft despatch and wrote in
trustworthy
, but that must have
been almost the last shot fired at it. The objection to it was a survival of a curious theory, widely held in pre-Fowler days, that no sentence could be ‘good grammar’, and no word a respectable word, if its construction violated logic or reason. But it is not the habit of the English to refrain from doing anything merely because it is illogical, and in any case it was less illogical to accept
reliable
than to strain at it after swallowing
available
and
objectionable
. (I shall have more to say about pedantry when we consider grammar in Chapter IX .)
    Nice
in the sense in which it is ordinarily used in conversation today has still not yet fully established itself in literary English, though we know from the rather priggish lecture that Henry Tilney gives about it to Catherine Morland in
Northanger Abbey
that it was trying to get over the barrier as far back as the start of the nineteenth century:
‘Oh! it is a very nice word indeed! it does for every thing. Originally perhaps it was applied only to express neatness, propriety, delicacy, or refinement;—people were nice in their dress, in their sentiments, or their choice. But now every commendation on every subject is comprised in that one word.’
    ‘While, in fact,’ cried his sister, ‘it ought only to be applied to you, without any commendation at all. You are more nice than wise.’
    Equally,
haver
does not mean ‘vacillate’ (it means ‘blather’), but almost everyone south of the Border thinks it does: there is no withstanding its suggestion of simultaneous hovering and wavering. The dictionaries do not yet recognise this, but doubtless they will soon bow to the inevitable. *
    There has been further stout resistance to certain words that attacked the barrier in the nineteenth century with powerful encouragement from Dickens—
mutual
,
individual
and
aggravate
.
Mutual
, not in the sense of ‘reciprocated’ but of ‘common’ or ‘pertaining to both parties’, as in
Our Mutual Friend
, goes back to the sixteenth century, according to the
OED
, yet some people still regard this as incorrect. Perhaps the reason it is so difficult to restrain the word to its ‘correct’ meaning is the ambiguity of
common
. (‘Our common friend’ might be taken as a reflection on the friend’s manners or birth.) * The use