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, artistic or professional, animates—­the practitioners of Jargon, who are, most of them (I repeat), douce respectable persons.  Caution is its father:  the instinct to save everything and especially trouble:  its mother, Indolence.  It looks precise, but it is not.  It is, in these times, safe:  a thousand men have said it before and not one to your knowledge had been prosecuted for it.  And so, like respectability in Chicago, Jargon stalks unchecked in our midst.  It is becoming the language of Parliament:  it has become the medium through which Boards of Government, County Councils, Syndicates, Committees, Commercial Firms, express the processes as well as the conclusions of their thought and so voice the reason of their being.

Has a Minister to say ‘No’ in the House of Commons?  Some men are constitutionally incapable of saying no:  but the Minister conveys it thus—­’The answer to the question is in the negative.’  That means ‘no.’  Can you discover it to mean anything less, or anything more except that the speaker is a pompous person?—­which was no part of the information demanded.

That is Jargon, and it happens to be accurate.  But as a rule Jargon is by no means accurate, its method being to walk circumspectly around its target; and its faith, that having done so it has either hit the bull’s-eye or at least achieved something equivalent, and safer.

Thus the Clerk of a Board of Guardians will minute that—­

     In the case of John Jenkins deceased the coffin provided was of the
     usual character.