Vox populi Bournemouth isn't Latin

In a change to the modus operandi of a local authority, that surely must be non compos mentis, Bournemouth Council has asked staff not to use nineteen Latin words and phrases because, they say, "Not everyone knows Latin. Many readers do not have English as their first language so using Latin can be particularly difficult". The nineteen words and phrases include: bona fide, eg (or exempli gratia), prima facie, ad lib (or ad libitum), etc (or et cetera), ie (or id est), inter alia, NB (or nota bene), per, per se, pro rata, quid pro quo, vis-a-vis, vice versa and via. The full article from the Sunday Telegraph is here.

 

I would have thought that some of those so-called Latin words were a lot more common than many words and phrases in the documents and instructions which are sent by councils to their residents - asking them to place their wheelie bins within the curtilage of their property, and talking of business process re-engineering and performance monitoring interviews. I wonder if the council is going to stop asking job applicants to fill in a curriculum vitae, or perhaps even to stop giving their fax number and producing their material in audio-visual format.

 

Where is the line between a Latin word and an English word? Around 30% of English words have a Latin origin. And what about words from other languages? Another 30% of words in the English language come from French (including Old French). Of course, there are some very good Anglo-Saxon words in English which we can use, and several come to mind right now as I think of Bournemouth Council!

 

The Plain English Campaign applauds the council's actions as, according to their representative, "people might mistake eg for egg". Perhaps they might; in a 2006 House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts report we were told that 12 million people have literacy skills and 16 million (that's around half the workforce) have numeracy skills at Level 1, which equates to a chronological age of 11.

 

It looks as if the reading age of Sunday Telegraph readers is not much older. The newspaper felt the need to give translations of the Latin phrases.