Prep School Style
Thomas Jones
No sooner was Jacob Rees-Mogg installed as Leader of the House of Commons than he sent out a ‘style guide’ to staff, essentially a list of words and phrases they were now ‘banned’ from using, along with demands that they address ‘all non-titled males as Esq.’ and use imperial measurements. No sooner was the document circulated than it was ‘leaked’ exclusively to ITV news. Within moments, it was all over Twitter, and Twitter was all over it.
Apart from the idiocy about esquires and imperial measurements, the rules in and of themselves are fairly innocuous: don’t use ‘hopefully’, ‘due to’, ‘got’, ‘ongoing’ etc. Rees-Mogg could have been given the list by his prep school English teacher. There’s a weird injunction never to use a comma after ‘and’ (Twitter is bristling with counter-examples) and, chances are, that’s a hangover from prep school too.
The whole business is a fairly transparent publicity exercise: ‘Trying to think of a better way to get journalists talking about you,’ Will Davies tweeted, ‘than issuing a bullshit *style guide*.’ Even the LRB has obliged. It’s all part of what James Meek calls Rees-Mogg’s ‘rolling re-enactment of steak-and-kidney-pudding Edwardian Britishness’: narcissistic and self-serving, certainly, but not so much a distraction from his schemes for self-enrichment as intricately bound up with them, ‘facets of a single worldview that shows the actual nature of Faragist Britain’.
Comments
An example pinched from one such book:
His accident was due to excessive alcohol consumption.
His accident occurred owing to the fact that he was talking on his cell phone.
I doubt that many of the occupants of the hell-bound handcart we are currently in are much exercised on this point.
What does JRM hope to do? Fossilize the language in an age before even he was born? Maybe we need an equivalent to the Académie Française ? Oh, and will he personally censor all communication that crosses his desk? Good luck with that.
"Welcome to the workshop, Jacob. Now mind where you go under that silly hat, be careful of the pit, oops. Pity about the blood, and sorry but we don't seem to have a primo auxilium buxum. We'll just send you home to nanny."
Therefore the example of "His accident was due to excessive alcohol consumption" would grieve this grammarian. In the US, I think it's OK, because it is understood to mean the same thing as the three recommended alternatives. That is, usage can create a new definition of a word or phrase ("prescriptive grammarians" are opposed to this idea). It seems like a case of normal language evolution to me.
There are many Americans who also understand that "due to" has an older, different meaning in sentences like, "He received all the credit due to him." Sometimes its just "due him". Rather than "owing to" this phrase means "owed to". Therefore, a dictionary might show both of these meanings, which are quite different from each other.
Due to pressing other matters, I will stop here.