Should we demand a literal ‘transparency’?
AT LEAST ONE reader had a problem (or maybe just an issue) with a word I used in last week’s column. I said that I preferred P-town as the short form of Provincetown, rather than Ptown or P’town, because it was conventional and also “transparent” – that is, the pronunciation was easily inferred from the spelling.
Harold McAleer of Lincoln did not approve of that adjective. “To me transparent means invisible, not visible,” he e-mailed. “You can see through a transparency literally, not figuratively, as in, ‘Oh, I can see right through that act!’ ”
He’s not the only one who’s impatient with transparent and transparency. Both T-words have surged in popularity in the past 15 years or so, and they’ve made it onto several pet-peeve lists. But the figurative meaning of transparent is not a cause for complaint; it may be odd, when you look at it closely, but it isn’t new and it isn’t wrong.
It’s true that the first sense of transparent is clear, penetrable by light, and thus “invisible” the way a clean window is invisible. But its figurative meanings – “easily seen through, recognized,” “obvious” and “frank, open, candid” – are more than 400 years old, says the Oxford English Dictionary, which quotes Shakespeare’s “transparent heretics” (1592).
A writer’s style can be transparent, or clear; a person can be transparent, or guileless; flattery can be transparent , or obvious. All these figurative uses, it’s true, involve a displacement of the adjective: If you call a motive or a style transparent, you don’t mean that you see through it, but that you see it clearly, as if any (real or hypothetical) obstruction is transparent. This might be an instance of the figure of speech called hypallage, or “displaced epithet” – as in “weary night,” “hopeful morning,” or T.S. Eliot’s “forgetful snow.” But whatever you call it, the usage is standard.
So if you want to hate transparent, you should complain not of its figurative uses but of its new voguishness – its popularity as a description of what governments and banks and businesses should be, in an ideal world.
Transparent and transparency fit nicely into the category of “vogue words” as H.W. Fowler defined it in “Modern English Usage” (1926). Vogue words aren’t necessarily novel or slangy; many are everyday terms turned fashionable, perhaps because they’ve found a new niche in the lexicon. Some young writers, said Fowler, may not even recognize that certain usages are trendy, and thus “repulsive to the old & the well-read.”
But do the old and the well-read prevail? From Fowler’s list, you’d have to conclude that vogue words often outlast their opponents, as have annex, intensive, conservative, meticulous, percentage, far-flung, vision, and foreword (Fowler preferred the older preface). When Ernest Gowers produced the second edition of Fowler, in 1965, there were new vogue words: emergency, impact, allergic, global, repercussion, rewarding (for satisfying), significant, fantastic, massive, unthinkable. Again, most have shed the repulsiveness Gowers detected in them.
Robert Burchfield’s third edition of Fowler, in 1996, put more phrases (which flaunt their voguishness more openly than words) on the list: Couch potato, brownie points, and name of the game joined lifestyle, meaningful, and syndrome. (But no transparency: that was left to Bryan Garner, who put it on his vogue-word list in Garner’s Modern American Usage, along with downsize, proactive, and gravitas.)
Transparency’s current revival is only a few decades old; William Safire, in a 1998 New York Times column, traced it to the Cold War “diplolingo” of the 1970s. So it’s too soon to know how it will sound to the usage mavens of future decades. But given our deep skepticism about institutions of government, finance, and business, transparency seems likely to flourish at least as long as annex, meticulous, and vision.
GONE LACKING: A couple of readers were startled by the recent Globe headline, “Boston’s schools go lacking in phys-ed.” One of them – Glenn Ickler of Hopedale – spotted a similar construction in another headline that day: “Veterans’ disability claims go neglected.” Was this the baneful influence of “go missing”?
Well, maybe and maybe not. Grammatically, there’s no problem with these expressions: Go without, meaning “do without, be deprived of” dates to 1596, says the OED. And we see nothing strange in go barefoot, go unshaven, go untreated, and the like.
Go lacking, while not common, is sprinkled here and there in the Google Books collection. An 1859 story in the Southern Literary Messenger has, “By the dragon’s snout, I’ll not have you go lacking for a friend.”
Go neglected is slightly more frequent; Elizabeth Peabody uses it, quoting Bronson Alcott, in her “Record of Mr. Alcott’s School” (1836): “Is it not better to hurt the body than to let the mind go neglected?” Neither expression, however, seems a likely contender for a turn in the vogue-word spotlight.
Jan Freeman, Boston Globe
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Full article: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/07/26/see_through/
