Yesterday I was editing some copy and came across a description of the brain as “this unique organ”. This was meant to be a compliment to the brain, but instead it’s a hopelessly empty description: all it says is that we only have one of them.

Another unique organ is the gallbladder. So is the spleen. And the appendix. But so what? A lot of things are unique in some little way, and if you look in close enough detail, technically everything is. The brain, though, is unique among organs like a phoenix among sparrows, not like a snowflake among other snowflakes.

If you want to make something sound interesting, then think about the qualities that make it unique (or at least distinctive).

What sets the brain apart from the other organs? It’s complex, it’s mysterious, it underlies our mind rather than merely physical functions (although its involvement in processes all over the body is also remarkable). It has these qualities uniquely.

So focus on the qualities rather than the bare fact of uniqueness in some undisclosed respect. The brain is uniquely complex, it’s uniquely mysterious, it uniquely underlies the mind. These statements all carry weight.

Or, if you prefer not to go into specifics like that, you could use a word such as ‘unparalleled’, ‘matchless’, ‘exceptional’ or ‘outstanding’. Only the first two truly imply uniqueness, but all of them – unlike ‘unique’ itself – put the thing so described on a pedestal and tell us that it’s well worth a look.

That was when I was seven.

Since then, I’ve become pickier about my modal auxiliaries (can, could, may, might, will, would, shall and should). But pedantic correctness isn’t everything, and sometime it gets in the way of good communication.

A few weeks ago, I approved some copy for a sign for exhibition visitors. It included a line that went like this:

You may use the cloakroom downstairs.

On reflection, I wish I’d changed it to say:

You can use the cloakroom downstairs.

My thinking at the time was that if you’re talking about permission you should use ‘may’ rather than ‘can’, which is about ability. (This is a rule that a lot of people don’t seem to know or care about, so depending on your linguistic ideology you might not think it’s a rule at all.)

My change of mind is based on pragmatics and tone: explicitly telling people that you’re giving them permission to do something (‘you may’) shows them that you’re the one with the power to decide what they’re allowed to do. It risks coming across as haughty or condescending.

But telling people they have the ability to do something (‘you can’) shifts the right of decision-making onto them. And in a context such as my cloakroom sign, it implicitly gives permission – more gently but no less clearly. (We’d have to be mad to tell people about a cloakroom they’re able but not allowed to use, and in most communication there’s a standard presumption of sanity.)

In fact, just telling people they have a certain ability can in such a case give them that ability. The main requirement for using the downstairs cloakroom is the knowledge that it’s there. The ‘can’ version of the sign gives readers the knowledge and thus the power. It’s not quite a performative utterance, but it’s in that sort of territory.

We can often use ‘can’ to imply permission perfectly clearly and more pleasantly than by stating it directly with ‘may’. Yes we can.

Three books I’ve heard encouraging things about are:

• Strictly English by Simon Heffer
• The Language Wars: A History of Proper English by Henry Hitchings
• The King’s English by Kingsley Amis

Are they any good? Are any others any good?

Here are some of my own, stretching the concept to cover language more broadly:

1. A subject and a verb disagrees about which bar to walk into.
2. An Oxford comma hops, skips, and jumps into a bar.
3. A pleonasm enters into a bar.
4. The subjunctive would walk into a bar, were it in the mood.
5. A hyphen, drunk after leaving the bar, mistakenly walks-into a phrasal verb.
6. A colon and a semicolon walk into a bar: the colon has a gutful; the semicolon orders a half.
7. A syllepsis walks out on its wife and into a bar.
8. A gang of commas walk into a bar and order everything on the menu.
9. A prescriptivist walks into a tavern, because of course ‘bar’ means the counter at which drink is served rather than the establishment itself. He wonders why nobody else is there.
10. A meaning walks into a bar and orders a double.
11. A portmanteau walks into a barmaid.

According to the Telegraph, the expansion of Scope’s retail arm “will set it on a collision course with Mary Portas”, “Nick Clegg has set himself on a collision course with David Cameron over EU policy”, the head of the UK Border Agency has “set himself on a collision course with ministers” and “transport minister Justine Greening is on a collision course with lobbyist Malcolm Ginsberg”.

You can see the thinking. It’s a physical metaphor of dramatic, determined movement that will surely lead to danger – just the sort of thing to enliven a piece of prose when all that’s meant is usually “someone disagrees with someone else” or “someone has done something that someone else won’t like”.

But it’s now one of Orwell’s dying metaphors: the phrase hasn’t ‘died’ to acquire a wholly figurative usage and, given the handiness of its literal sense, it probably never will. Nor, though, is it likely to strike the reader with its freshness or convey a clear and helpful mental image (are Boris’s “tube plans” to drive a train down a tunnel towards the one that the unions are on?).

It’s a stale cliché, overused by the political and media class, that no normal person would use in conversation. Let’s find some other poor figure of speech to torment for a few years. Maybe “Nick Clegg has put an unexpected item in David Cameron’s bagging area”.

If for no other reason, we should stop using it because when the day comes that we have to phone up Bruce Willis to beg for help with a massive asteroid that’s on a collision course with Earth, he might misunderstand and issue a statement praising our planet and deploring the asteroid’s irresponsible views.

And if he does that, we’ll have to rely on Elijah Wood to save us. And I don’t think anybody wants that.

There are people – maybe you work with some of them – who would rather say this:

Going forward, a resource has been tasked to action any additional issues experienced by customers around internal environmental controls.

When they could say this:

I have asked a colleague to deal with any other heating problems you have.

Of course, people have legitimate differences of taste in the kind of vocabulary and sentence structures they use, but preferring the former is clearly pathological. In my experience, there are two kinds of person stricken by the need to use jargon.

• Type 1 jargonitis: ‘I’m not some nobody having a chat in a pub, I’m a proper professional doing serious business – and that’s the way I’ll talk.’

These people think jargon is great, that it makes them sound more knowledgeable and important and worthy of a promotion. The bolder and more imaginative among them are the ones who actually come up with new buzzwords and phrases.

I don’t mean to be harsh, but there is no hope for these people. Their failing is moral rather than intellectual: they believe that the conventions of language are there to be overturned in pursuit of self-advancement, not used for communicating clearly. They are past saving, and we can only hope that they’ll be correctly diagnosed and safely institutionalised. In practice, all you can really do is humour them and try to keep them away from the uninfected.

Fortunately, most people with jargonitis aren’t type 1 (the origin of which is unclear, but is thought to be congenital). Most have the second type, which is an acquired immune disorder.

• Type 2 jargonitis: ‘Oh, everyone else seems to be talking like this. How odd. Well, I’d better learn some of these phrases so I fit in.’

I’ve seen good people laid low by this. I’ve watched them slowly dismantle their own natural fluency as they first adapt to communicating with more seasoned jargon users and then internalise it so that eventually they start spreading the affliction themselves.

But these people – apart from some extreme cases – can be cured.

What causes them to succumb is often inexperience or lack of self-confidence. They go along with what seems to be ‘the done thing’, even if they’re not initially comfortable with it, because they don’t know that business language need not be like this, or because they don’t dare push against the established approach.

They need encouragement and example, because part of the tragedy of jargonitis is that its victims are often unable to realise their condition.

If you’re in a position to influence new people when they’re at risk of getting infected or in the early stages of disease, let them know they’re allowed to resist. Suggest that they bear in mind what’s easy to read or listen to, rather than trying to follow some unwritten business-speak phrasebook. Reassure them that corporate jargon is every bit as alien as it first seems. It’s long-winded and abstract and impersonal and clumsy and really very boring.

And show them how to resist. In your emails, reports, presentations, meetings – let them see that talking and writing like a human being doesn’t make the sky fall in on your career. (Bosses who are long steeped in jargon can be a problem, but you may still be able to nudge them towards seeing that this very language is the box they’ve always been wanting to think outside of.)

Sure, you may have terms that are a bit technical and specific to your work; they’re fair enough. ‘Search engine optimisation’, for instance, is not exactly pretty – but it has a specific meaning. It does a job. But there’s so much waffle (see my example at the top) that sacrifices clear, direct language to nothing more than a misguided need to sound ‘official’ and ‘professional’. It’s not more professional, though – in fact, it’s just less effective.

Like a boring, ugly drunk at a party, jargon-laden corporate waffle can be hard to shake off. A great place to pick up some tips is the Good Copy, Bad Copy blog.

1) The cakes that I baked won first prize. [restrictive: I’m singling out my cakes]

2) The cakes, which I baked, won first prize. [non-restrictive: the only cakes under discussion are mine, and I’m adding my claim to them as an aside]

And the following would be incorrect:

1a) The cakes which I baked won first prize. [supposedly restrictive]

But after reading some interventions from Stan Carey (expanded here), and an Arnold Zwicky post he linked to, I have recanted. Everyone agrees that 1 and 2 are right (everyone also agrees that ‘The cakes, that I baked, won first prize’ would be wrong), but now I agree that 1a is OK too. ‘Which’ and ‘that’ can both work for restrictive clauses.

Linguistic rules (or ‘rules’) may or may not be widely and consistently followed, but even if they’re not, they’re still worth hanging onto if they serve a useful purpose. The that-rule is on the niche side (lots of people, including lots of Respected Writers, ignore it), but I had thought it useful for clarity’s sake.

But it’s not. There’s also a difference in the punctuation of restrictive and non-restrictive clauses. 2 and 1a are clearly distinct in a way that makes it hard to misunderstand: the aside in 2 is marked with commas. This suggests insisting on ‘that’ is unnecessary.

Is it always unnecessary?

David’s strongest counterargument is when we’ve got sentences with more complex structure – particularly with other asides and the extra commas they bring. For instance (my own examples, but based on his point):

Portugal is a nice country, like Spain, which I visited last year. [I visited Spain]

Portugal is a nice country, like Spain, that I visited last year. [I visited Portugal]

Abandoning the that-rule would cost us “a useful distinction here”, David argues.

Not necessarily. There are other ways to show the difference. For one thing, we could repunctuate:

Portugal is a nice country, like Spain (which I visited last year). [I visited Spain]

Portugal is a nice country (like Spain, which I visited last year). [I visited Spain]

Portugal is a nice country (like Spain) which I visited last year. [I visited Portugal]

And there are any number of ways to rephrase for clarity.

But what clinches it for me is that there are times when the that-rule positively leads to calamity (I exaggerate, but I have to maintain a sense of excitement in my life somehow). Some restrictive clauses just don’t work with ‘that’. Arnold offers:

The only case of which I have direct knowledge occurred in 1972.

It has to be this way: ‘The only case of that I have direct knowledge’ is a train wreck.

But could we handle such cases by saying that restrictive clauses should use ‘that’ rather than ‘which’ except when the clause begins with a preposition? Only at the cost of further complicating matters. And at the cost of missing other exceptions – commenting on David’s piece, shemarch offers:

The best use of a word is that which makes the clearest sense.

Another restrictive clause that would be absurd if introduced with a ‘that’ instead of a ‘which’. And I’d not want to rule out other types of counterexample.

The that-rule doesn’t work. And so, yesterday night, I went to bed having gladly renounced it.

(In spite of all this, I still think ‘that’ is usually better aesthetically than ‘which’ for a restrictive clause. Maybe it’s the sharper ‘T’ sound at the end, which gives a better sense of narrowing down or pointing out; maybe it’s association with the demonstrative use of ‘that’, as in ‘Look at that restrictive clause!’ So I’ll mostly stick to ‘that’, but no longer on grammatical grounds.)

A news item about the London Olympic stadium… set the reader a puzzle: “Its designers say it is the most sustainable stadium ever built, using as much as 75 per cent less steel – an expensive and relatively scarce resource – than other stadiums.” The question is this: why prefer the semi-opaque “as much as 75 per cent less steel than other stadiums” to the straightforward “a quarter as much steel as some stadiums”?

I don’t know, but I do know that whenever you see either “relatively” or “as much as”… you can be sure you are in the presence of fuzzy thinking, and probably an attempt to cherry-pick figures. To call a resource “relatively scarce” is to say nothing. Relatively to what? Sand, diamonds, Swiss cheese?

All quite right, but there’s another problem there: to say that it is “the most sustainable stadium ever built” is to say that it will be the easiest to sustain. So the stadium will survive while others crumble and perish? How does the low steel content help to sustain it?

The rot starts at the top, with the ‘Commission for a Sustainable London 2012’ going on and on and on about:

the world’s first truly sustainable Olympic and Paralympic Games … Staging the biggest event in the world in a sustainable way … I look back on a great sustainable construction project and look forward to a memorable, sustainable Games

No. The Olympics will last from 27 July to 12 August 2012, and then stop. A particular occurrence by definition is not sustained, so any talk of its sustainability is a category mistake.

‘Sustainable’ can mean ‘good for the environment’ when talking about an ongoing process or enduring condition whose continuance may be under threat (sustainable development, sustainable forest management). But stretching it beyond that leads to gibberish.

This was at root a speech in an ethical socialist tradition with deep roots in British labour history

That’s what we mathematologists call a ‘square root’.

When proofreading great men of letters
Remember they think they’re your betters.
They wrote it? They meant it!
A rule broke? They ‘bent’ it!
The editors they like are stetters.

In matters linguistic and verbal
I’m often reduced to a burble
I try for a word
But it comes out absurd
Having stuck in my throat like a furball

When you’re a stylistic obsessive
You see words and get all possessive
If a line’s badly phrased
Then your hackles get raised
And your voice becomes passive-aggressive

The three winners were very good, as were plenty of the other entries. Do take a look. Oh, and here are another two, which I’ve written today, just for the hell of it (and getting a bit meta):

A young poet from Alabama
Declined to pursue fame and glamour
He sat on his arse
And decided to parse
Limericks with impeccable grammar

This ditty with language quite heinous
Is so crude it really could pain us
Its first lines allude
To an ending most rude –
But I think that it need not detain us