main: but we shall be agreed in understanding what it is, or at any
rate what it is not, that we talk about. I remember to have heard
somewhere of a religious body in the United States of America which had
reason to suspect one of its churches of accepting Spiritual consolation
from a coloured preacher--an offence against the laws of the Synod--and
despatched a Disciplinary Committee with power to act; and of the
Committee's returning to report itself unable to take any action under
its terms of reference, for that while a person undoubtedly coloured had
undoubtedly occupied the pulpit and had audibly spoken from it in the
Committee's presence, the performance could be brought within no
definition of preaching known or discoverable. So it is with that
infirmity of speech--that flux, that determination of words to the mouth,
or to the pen--which, though it be familiar to you in parliamentary
debates, in newspapers, and as the staple language of Blue Books,
Committees, Official Reports, I take leave to introduce to you as prose
which is not prose and under its real name of Jargon.

You must not confuse this Jargon with what is called Journalese. The two
overlap, indeed, and have a knack of assimilating each other's vices. But
Jargon finds, maybe, the most of its votaries among good douce people who
have never written to or for a newspaper in their life, who would never
talk of 'adverse climatic conditions' when they mean 'bad weather'; who
have never trifled with verbs such as 'obsess,' 'recrudesce,' 'envisage,'
'adumbrate,' or with phrases such as 'the psychological moment,' 'the
true inwardness,' 'it gives furiously to think.' It dallies with
Latinity--'sub silentio,' 'de die in diem,' 'cui bono?' (always in the
sense, unsuspected by Cicero, of 'What is the profit?')--but not for the
sake of style. Your journalist at the worst is an artist in his way: he
daubs paint of this kind upon the lily with a professional zeal; the more
flagrant (or, to use his own word, arresting) the pigment, the happier is
his soul. Like the Babu he is trying all the while to embellish our poor
language, to make it more floriferous, more poetical--like the Babu for
example who, reporting his mother's death, wrote, 'Regret to inform you,
the hand that rocked the cradle has kicked the bucket.'

_There_ is metaphor: _there_ is ornament: _there_ is a sense of poetry,
though as yet groping in a world unrealised. No such gusto marks--no such
zeal, a