Moving swiftly on...

Back to the Economist style guide, briefly, and if you haven't already taken their quiz, may I urge you to do so? It is fantastically annoying. I managed to get 8/12, with which I was quietly satisfied, anything much higher than that would have been worrying*.

I'll pause for a moment to let you take the test before picking over the answers.

[pause]

All done? Here we go then:

1) Tone. Use the language of everyday speech, not that of spokesmen, lawyers or bureaucrats (so prefer let to permit, people to persons, buy to purchase, colleague to peer, way out to exit, present to gift, rich to wealthy, break to violate)...

Well, that's fair enough I suppose. I'm all for using the language of everyday speech. In fact it chimes in quite nicely with Nancy Mitford's prescription of the U and the Non-U. Make of that what you will. What's next?

2) Use the subjunctive properly. If you are posing a hypothesis contrary to fact, you must use the subjunctive. Thus, "If Hitler were alive today, he could tell us whether he kept a diary". If the hypothesis may or may not be true, you do not use the subjunctive: "If this diary is not Hitler's, we shall be glad we did not publish it". If you have would in the main clause, you must use the subjunctive in the if clause. If you were to disregard this rule, you would make a fool of yourself".

Aside from the fact it's incredibly pompously put, that is handy to know. I'm pretty good with the subjunctive usually, but don't think I ever actually knew the rule as such, I've just been bumbling along for all these years with what sounded right after "If..". Should have paid more attention iin A Level French.

Just time for one more before I've had enough of EconomistWorld for one week:

4) Avoid, where possible, euphemisms and circumlocutions promoted by interest-groups. The hearing impaired are simply deaf. It is no disrespect to the disabled sometimes to describe them as crippled. Female teenagers are girls, not women. The underprivileged may be disadvantaged, but are more likely just poor.

Oh dear lord. Sometimes, Mr Economist, people can have impairments to their hearing without actually being deaf, which does kind of imply a fairly profound hearing loss. I don't honestly think you can use "crippled" except as a verb - or at a push as an adverb. More to the point, adult females are women, whether you like it or not - and that includes 18 or 19-year-olds.

The point about all this, it seems to me, is to ask yourself one crucial question: do you write for the Economist? If the answer is "no", then it's probably as well to treat this style guide, invaluable as it is, with caution. There's a lot to be said for adopting a style appropriate to the medium. As long as the punctuation's right, of course.


* This is clearly a big, fat lie designed to hide the fact that I am now a broken woman, having failed to get anything even approaching a perfect score.