Free Plain Words by Rebecca Gowers Page B

hospital), and
publicise
(give publicity to). The reason for inventing them seems to be to enable us to say in one word what would otherwise need several. Whether that will prove a valid passport time alone can show. If the words I have listed were all, they might be swallowed, though with wry faces. But they are by no means all. A glut of this diet is being offered to us (
trialise
,
itinerise
,
casualise
and
reliableise
are among the specimens sent to me), and they continue to come no matter our nausea. It is perhaps significant that at the Coronation of Queen Elizabeth II the word
Inthroning
was substituted for the first time for
Inthronisation
, used in all previous coronations. This may be symptomatic of a revolt against the ugliness of
ise
and still more of
isation
, which Sir Alan Herbert has compared to
lavatory fittings, useful in their proper place but not to be multiplied beyond what is necessary for practical purposes.
    Another popular way of making new words is to put
de
,
dis
or
non
at the beginning of a word in order to create one with an opposite meaning.
De
and
dis
are termed by the
OED
‘living prefixes with privative force’. ‘Living’ is the right word. They have been living riotously of late. Anyone, it seems, can make a new verb by prefixing
de
to an existing one. Sir Alan, still on the warpath, drew up a list of a few remarkable creations of this sort, calling them ‘septic’. Among his examples were
derestrict
,
dewater
,
debureaucratise
,
decontaminate
,
dedirt
,
dehumidify
,
deratizate
(to eliminate rats),
deinsectize
, *
dezincify
. (The Ministry of Food, I am told, once fixed maximum prices for
defeathered
geese.)
    Some of these, it is to be hoped, may prove to be freaks of an occasion and will be seen no more. But there is a class that appears permanent. This comprises verbs that denote the undoing of something the doing of which called for—or at any rate was given—a special term. If to affect with gas is to
contaminate
, to enforce a speed limit is to
restrict
, and to commandeer a house is to
requisition
, then the cancellation of those things will inevitably, whether we like it or not, be
decontaminate
,
derestrict
and
derequisition
, and it is no use saying that they ought to be
cleanse
,
exempt
or
release
, or any other words that are not directly linked with their opposites. Most of the new
dis-
words since the war have been invented by
economists (several by
The Economist
itself).
Disincentive
and
disinflation
, received at first with surprised disapproval, seem to have quite settled down. It is recognised that the old-fashioned opposites of
incentive
and
inflation
—
deterrent
and
deflation
—will not do: we need a special word for the particular form of deterrent that discourages us from working hard, and for a process of checking inflation that is something less than deflation. Yet on the heels of these new arrivals come
diseconomy
and
dissaving
:
It would yield economies that would far outweigh the diseconomies that are the inevitable price of public ownership and giant size.
    Some 13.4 million of the 22 million income earners … kept their spending in such exact step with their incomes that they saved or dissaved less than £25 in that year.
    Will these be accepted also on the ground that in the first, no positive word—neither
extravagance
nor
waste
nor
wastefulness
—would express the writer’s meaning so well as ‘diseconomies’, and that in the second, ‘dissaved’ is the only way of expressing the opposite of
saved
without a clumsy periphrasis that would destroy the nice balance of the sentence? Perhaps; it is at least certain that these words spring from deliberate and provocative choice and not from mental indolence. What is deplorable is that so many of those who go in for the invention of opposites by means of ‘living prefixes with privative force’ do not know when to stop. It becomes a disease. ‘Disincentive’ replaces
deterrent
, then