order of my argument and to interpose some words upon a kind of writing
which, from a superficial likeness, commonly passes for prose in these
days, and by lazy folk is commonly written for prose, yet actually is not
prose at all; my excuse being the simple practical one that, by first
clearing this sham prose out of the way, we shall the better deal with
honest prose when we come to it. The proper difficulties of prose will
remain: but we shall be agreed in understanding what it is, or at any
rate what it is not, that we talk about. I remember to have heard
somewhere of a religious body in the United States of America which had
reason to suspect one of its churches of accepting Spiritual consolation
from a coloured preacher--an offence against the laws of the Synod--and
despatched a Disciplinary Committee with power to act; and of the
Committee's returning to report itself unable to take any action under
its terms of reference, for that while a person undoubtedly coloured had
undoubtedly occupied the pulpit and had audibly spoken from it in the
Committee's presence, the performance could be brought within no
definition of preaching known or discoverable. So it is with that
infirmity of speech--that flux, that determination of words to the mouth,
or to the pen--which, though it be familiar to you in parliamentary
debates, in newspapers, and as the staple language of Blue Books,
Committees, Official Reports, I take leave to introduce to you as prose
which is not prose and under its real name of Jargon.

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