Economic Distinctions

Nice Distinctions
One of the most important laws of language development is the Law of Least Effort. It normally applies only to pronunciation and spelling but seems to be taking a hold in semantics too. I've mentioned before the distinction between disinterested and uninterested, which seems to be fading; the distinctions between less and fewer and majority and most are other examples. It seems the same is happening in French.

A word that is ambiguous in English but which the French had sorted is “another”. In English, for instance, wanting another (item) can be either wanting one more of the same or wanting something different. In French the ambiguity is avoided, “encore un(e)” being more of the same and “un(e) autre” being something different. Admittedly, the same distinction can easily be made in English by using “a different one” or "one more" rather than “another” but another is still ambiguous. I mention this because the subject came up in conversation over dinner with Steve, Jo, Daniel and Michèle and Daniel and Michèle both said the distinction is going in current French. They are introducing the same ambiguity that there is in English.

As the world becomes more visually oriented so language seems to be becoming less precise, although there is no real need for this. It probably owes much, in England certainly, to the way language has been taught in schools over the past few decades. Does it matter? I've asked the question before, because there are always alternative ways of expressing oneself, but now I'm coming to the conclusion that it does; otherwise misunderstandings are too easily made. I've just started filling in my UK tax return for next year; I'm not sure why I still get one but I do. Being resident outside the UK I have to state how many days I have spent in the UK and I'm also asked to state how many working days. Since I normally come for a week, I simply subtracted the number of weekend days from the total days to arrive at the latter figure. Then I thought: why am I being asked this? I thought: OK, maybe for some statistics they are collecting. But then it occurred to me that what they really wanted to know was not how many working days I spent in the UK but how many days working. This is the kind of ambiguity that can so easily creep in and either needs footnotes to sort out or else buggers up their statistics (serves them right). Or, of course, we could pay more attention to the language we use.

It has just occurred to me that it would be possible to calculate the cost, for every official form and every recipient, of printing every foot note rendered necessary only because questions are badly expressed. The total must be millions of pounds. Now there's an argument that could be persuasive.

All this contrasts starkly with the time when I chaired the British Standards Institution committee drafting a definition of Year 2000 compliance, when every word and phrase in the definition was carefully examined for ambiguity. It helped then to have lawyers on the committee. I wonder how much money they are making because of carelessly drafted documents. Lazy language must be a gold mine for them.