From his stone cottage on the island of Guernsey, the eminent British language scholar H.W. Fowler wrote an essay in 1926 in which he drew attention to the tendency for young writers and ‘second-rate’ writers to avoid using the same word in a sentence. He coined the phrase ‘elegant variation’ to describe this phenomenon. At the time, ‘elegant’ was a disparaging adjective for pretentious or precious refinement. Bryan Garner at 509 in his usage guide cites Charles W. Morton (1955) who refers to the ‘the elongated yellow fruit school of writing’. By using elegant variation an author wants to seem witty or knowledgeable but may also come across as pompous.
In the world of journalism, two phrases have emerged that contemporise Fowler’s coinage: pov, an acronym for ‘popular orange vegetable’ (the carrot), and knobbly monster (the crocodile). At the Guardian newspaper website, Jamie Fahey curates a list of povs. He came up with the acronym when he was working as a sub-editor at the Liverpool Echo and read a feature on the health benefits of eating carrots. Beginning the second paragraph was the ludicrous phrase: ‘The popular orange vegetable . . .’. In the press there are stereotypical instances of what is now called inelegant variation: India and Pakistan are ‘nuclear neighbours’ at second mention; North Korea, the ‘reclusive state’.
Inserting variation into a sentence is often not only bad style and variety for variety’s sake, but can seriously confuse the reader. As Garner says at 510-509: ‘If you write about a person’s “candour” in one sentence and “honesty” in the next [note that one sentence can contaminate another], is the reader to infer that you are distinguishing between two traits, or using different words to refer to the same one?’ To wit, the “BMW” at one point in the sentence is the “sporty roadster” at another—or not. Some amusing examples are below:
- billiard balls = numbered spheroids
- milk = lacteal fluid
- oysters = succulent bivalves
- songbird = avian songster
- truck = rubber-tired mastodon of the highway
- Ireland = cockatoo-shaped landmass
- Easter-egg hunt = hen-fruit safari
- crucifix = the Christian emblem
- asparagus = the pointy veg
- a vegetarian = the confirmed spinach addict
I had fun making up pov sentences. The last one is particularly dreadful:
That evening I ate oysters at my club and was later unwell. As for the succulent bivalves, who knows whether they were to blame?
Clarissa had her brats round, and the Easter egg hunt was a triumph: bent upon the hen-fruit safari, they trampled the poenies, invaded the tulip beds, and laid waste to Martha’s creeping phlox.
And there it was: Ireland in the late evening. The horn blast announced to the port the ferry’s imminent arrival from Roslare. And Patrick gazed ruefully at the lights strung out like dirty pearls upon the harbour at Dublin, illuminating the evening and the cockatoo-shaped landmass he called home.
Inelegant variation may also come when a writer keeps the word but changes inflections: at second mention, sanguinary becomes sanguine and fictional becomes fictitious and collegiate becomes collegial (Garner: 509). As Garner says ‘certain pairs lend themselves to this snare’ (ibid). Indeed amateur writers imagine that, for this very purpose, needless variants were created: needless variants are words with different inflections yet exactly the same meaning. English is chock full of them. I imagine they’ll be a post about this disease coming soon.
References:
Bryan A. Garner, Garner’s Modern English Usage (2016).
H.W. Fowler, The New Fowler’s Modern English Usage, edited by R.W. Burchfield (1996).
Jamie Fahey, https://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2010/jun/02/my-synonym-hell-mind-your-language?guni=Article:in%20body%20link
‘knobbly monsters’ found on X, @Second Mentions
