Mark My Words: false friends

Though Colin may be drifting down the Nile (or more accurately, stationary in Cairo), his global media empire rolls on. Here, from the third of his My Word columns for The National in Abu Dhabi are his thoughts on words that are often misused in French and in English...

Faux amis, the French call them. These are the words that seem correct when uttered or written, but actually have meanings quite different from what was intended.

Thus, English speakers with a little, but not enough, knowledge of the language of Molière may use versatile, not realising that it means unpredictable, rétribution for something other than wages or notoriété in ignorance of its true definition – any kind of fame, good or bad.

There are numerous other traps that make French a treacherous terrain to navigate, and I have been caught in a fair number of them. But English has false friends of its own, as one former editor of The Daily Telegraph in London, Charles Moore, was fond of noting.

Charles had a habit of opening his morning editorial conference by drawing attention to that day’s howlers. He rarely sounded angry, but some of us became accustomed to the subtle changes of emphasis and tone that would offer clues to the degree of his displeasure.

The rebuke would start something like this: “In my never-ending campaign to persuade everyone to be careful about words that sound as if they are correct but are, in fact, not ...”

Examples I recall include “testament” when the writer meant “testimony”, “disinterested" for "uninterested”, “flounder” for “founder” and “flout” for “flaunt”. “Please can we also try to remember,” he said on more than one occasion, “that ‘infer’ and ‘imply’ do not mean the same thing, and neither do ‘refute’ and ‘deny’.”

Here, as I mentioned in my speech when invited to address the Queen’s English Society in London, lies an inconvenient complication. The dictionary compilers are not always on Charles Moore’s side. With “imply” and “infer”, despite widespread misuse, the issue is clear: a speaker implies that something unspoken is the case, whereas the listener draws conclusions from what is inferred.

However, these days “refute” can mean “deny”, albeit as a secondary definition. “Traditionalists object,” the Concise Oxford English Dictionary states, “but it is now widely accepted in standard English.”

Traditionalists, among whom I am usually proud to include myself, may object to what I am about to say. Colleagues who regard me as an inflexible pedant will be surprised, too. Yet it is my firm belief that English is a developing language. That is made inevitable by continual advances in science, communications and most other areas of human activity, as well as by everyday usage.

Consider the collocation “different from”, used in the opening paragraph of this article. I originally wrote “different to”, only to have second thoughts. The OED supports me twice over: “respected writers” have used them both and even “different than”, it declares, though the latter form “is largely restricted to North America”.

For the sake of my credibility as a champion of British English, I feel suitably relieved that the third option was the one that had not occurred to me.

I would not, however, wish Anglo-American disagreements to cloud my judgement. It is reasonable, I suggest, to aim at all times for clarity and elegance of expression; it is unrealistic to hope that the means of expression should never change.

Comments

[Joan]

I tend to like changes that add to the language, and dislike those that shrink it. As 'disinterested' is increasingly used as a synonym for 'uninterested' we lose its exact meaning. On the other hand, a phrase I heard recently and liked was 'wriggle room'. It's a good image and has a different feel to (from?) 'room for manoeuvre'.