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Prefer the Standard to the Offbeat  - or

Suggestions and Cautionary Hints for the Writer

category: writing

The following is taken from cautionary hint no. 21, found in chapter 5 of Strunk and White's The Elements of Style, now in its third edition. Chapter 5 is called An Approach to Style and was written by E. B. White, in 1971, for the second edition. Cautionary hint No. 21, Prefer the standard to the offbeat, is something anyone writing about business and technology, particularly on the Internet, should read and think about from time to time.

E. B. White writes, in part:

The young writer will be drawn at every turn toward eccentricities in language. He will hear the beat of new vocabularies, the exciting rhythms of special segments of his society, each speaking a language of its own. All of us come under the spell of these unsettling drums; the problem for the beginner is to listen to them, learn the words, feel the vibrations, and not be carried away.

Youth invariably speaks to youth in a tongue of his own devising: he renovates the language with a wild vigor, as he would a basement apartment. By the time this paragraph sees print, uptight, ripoff, rap, dude, vibes, copout, and funky will be the words of yesteryear, and we will be fielding more recent ones that come bouncing into our speech -- some of them into our dictionary as well. The new word is always up for survival. Many do survive. Others grow stale and disappear. Most are, at least in their infancy, more appropriate to conversation than to composition...

Another segment of society that has constructed a language of its own is business. (read also technology) The businessman says that ink erasers are in short supply, that he has updated the next shipment of these erasers, and that he will finalize his recommendations at the next meeting of the board. He's speaking a language that is familiar to him and dear to him. Its portentous nouns and verbs invest events with high adventure; the executive walks among ink erasers comparisoned like a knight. We should tolerate him -- every man of spirit wants to ride a white horse. The only question is whether his vocabulary is helpful to ordinary prose. Usually, the same ideas can be expressed less formidably, if one makes the effort. A good many of the special words of business seem designed more to express the user's dreams than to express his precise meaning. Not all such words, of course, can be dismissed summarily; indeed, no word in the language can be dismissed offhand by anyone who has a healthy curisoity... The general rule here is to prefer the standard. Finalize, for instance, is not standard; it is special, and it is a particularly fuzzy and silly word. Does it mean "terminate," or does it mean "put into final form"? One can't be sure, really, what it means, and one gets the impression that the person using it doesn't know, either, and doesn't want to know.

He said on 03.31.05 @ 05:54 PM CST