On Latin Words
Brent Simmons recently published a critique of the words used in the tab labels of Twitter’s new iPhone app. It’s a fine piece, but one part of it doesn’t ring true.
In a section titled “What we know about people and words”, Simmons writes, “English speakers respond best to non-Latinate words.” He then goes on to criticise Twitter’s use of the words connect and discover for being Latin in origin, as well as for sounding like they were selected by “a murder of marketing executives perched around a big table.”
But he is wrong that connect and discover are bad words per se1. And it’s certainly not true that the words “mean almost nothing.” When describing the action of attaching a cable to a socket, connect would be a perfectly good word. And when discussing Bjarni Herjólfsson, I’m pretty sure you’re going to want to use the word “discover”. The problem is the context. In the Twitter app, the words aren’t good choices because they don’t describe what they’re labelling. Simmons does understand this, and—previously mentioned quotes notwithstanding—he does a great job of explaining it in his article. But then he throws in the stuff about Latin words somehow inherently turning off readers, and my head starts to hurt.
So where does Simmon’s stated dislike for Latin words come from? I asked him directly, but he didn’t respond, and I couldn’t find a source for the rule. My best guess is that he is misremembering George Orwell’s famous essay, Politics and the English Language. But Orwell doesn’t actually claim that all Latin words are bad. Instead, he protests against people who deliberately use long Latin words in an attempt to sound more impressive:
“Bad writers, and especially scientific, political, and sociological writers, are nearly always haunted by the notion that Latin or Greek words are grander than Saxon ones, and unnecessary words like expedite, ameliorate, predict, extraneous, deracinated, clandestine, subaqueous, and hundreds of others constantly gain ground from their Anglo-Saxon numbers.”
Indeed, later on in the essay Orwell writes: “Nor does it even imply in every case preferring the Saxon word to the Latin one”. No, Orwell merely wanted people to use clear, straightforward language.2 I don’t think, for example, Orwell would have had any problem with the use of the word car3.
In fact, I don’t believe Simmons would have any problem with that, either. I was tempted to go through his entire article marking all the words that had a Latin origin, but it would have taken aaages and would have been belabouring the point. Instead, let’s just look at his suggestions for better words for Twitter’s UI. He himself notes that his preference for the name of the Me tab, Profile, is Latin, but he doesn’t mention that his suggestion of Mentions instead of Connect is also Latin in origin. And although Tweets and Timeline are both fairly new words, line comes from Latin, too. So if two-and-a-bit of the four words Simmons prefers for the interface are Latin in origin, can he really believe that Latin words should generally be avoided?4
As I said, it’s a good piece5, but strike out all the parts about Latin and it would be even better.
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Do you see what I have done there? ↩
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Whether or not Orwell’s advice is something one should attempt to follow is a whole other kettle full of delicious, wriggling, fishies. Orwell was certainly a superb writer, but his status as an analyst of language is somewhat less clear. Take, for example, his stance on the passive voice. In the very same essay that Orwell writes: “Never use the passive where you can use the active,” over 20% of the verb forms that he uses are passive in construction. That’s considerably higher than the highest rate (13%) found in various periodicals in three statistical studies. See also this further analysis of Orwell’s essay, from the good people of Language Log. ↩
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Tip of the hat to James Harbeck for the tip-off, who also has sensible things to say about Latin words on his Sesquiotica blog. ↩
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Not enough evidence for you? Okay, try this. Simmons writes: “When asking your significant other to pick up some milk on the way home, you don’t ask, ‘Will you attend the purveyors and retrieve a dairy beverage?’ You ask, ‘Will you stop at the store and pick up some milk?’”. But stop, store, and milk all come from Latin. Correction: reagank points out in the comments below that milk didn’t actually come into English via Latin, although it is related to a Latin word. However, as it turns out that neither purveyor nor dairy come from Latin, I think the point stands. ↩
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Special bonus footnote. Sean Sperte has written an interesting rebuttal to the rest of Simmons’s post, which is worth a read. ↩
