PLAIN ENGLISH

Northern Advocate, 20 June 1925, Page 4

PLAIN ENGLISH

An interesting ciisct.s- : ;m bet v. ; magistrate and a meili -al man : •••». i place the other day in a London j Court. The medical ma si was calle ! i testify as to the condition of a '■ , who was charged with drunkenness. ;■! [he stated that th<- onl rauve of ■' j condition which the police had i j taken for drunkenness was "rr. j paraplegia." "What is that?"pr<- t-, I ly asked the Bench, thinking :>e ■ : s that theie was some confusion an.! o <it I spastic rarnnlegia really a pi" e j devised to test, the n - »wcr of one ■ •<*- ! pected of inebriety. Possibly the v istrat-e suspected some ing, for the mere layman would V<> .- , r>t. J to fancy that spastic pnrnplegio " mean «onie sort of paralvsis that ed its victim with "snasms." P.!it it is alwavs unwise to assume that a technical term in the mouth of a a-.an of science means what the words would be expected to mean. According to the testifying doctor in this case, spastic paraplegia really means "acute ,'iervous exhaustion." "Why not nse plain English?" inquired the disgusted j magistrate when the truth was thus revealed. The doctor explained that it was "not the custom," and the reply of the Bench was a pi en that the custom sh mid be changed,' the magistrate complaining that "the. medical pro fession has received sufficient hints from the legal profession as to what is j the proper thing to do." But surely i the Bar was presuming in its attempt ! to instruct the sister profession. Could not the doctors turn upon the lawyers? | There is a -legal jargon as well as a I medical jargon, and the physician may protest that his Greek is quite as good as the .barrister's Latin. After all, every kind of vocation has its own stock o." technical terms, some of them easily intelligible, some of them reasonably formed, some of them superfluous, perverted, or obscure. Esoteric vocabularies are always being built up by people who have interests a little apart from the rest of the world. Groups cf people following a particular calling, parties playing a game, students living together at a college— everywhere there are sections that develop their own peculiarities of vocabulary. Seme of the words which they use are needed to express new things, j but some, of' them, of course, are mere decorations of language. Even the most learned of the professions and the most austere of the sciences are not | exempt from the common desire to bo decorative in speech. When the expert has discovered a new fact or in- ; vented a new theory he loves to give it a name worthy of his own ingenuity, for to talk in a jargon which nobody else uses seems to enhance his dignity. And perhaps we are most of us rather pleased when our experts are rather, incomprehensible. When we consult our specialist we want him to talk in words that we never heard before; plain English would be disappointing. Neither the cause nor the cure of onything iiay be revealed by giving it a name mere or less legitimatelv derived from the Greek language; but a fine Greek compound certainly exhilarates one with its pomp and circumstance.