Reading too much

This is not about losing yourself in a novel, or even straining your eyesight; but about the way we can be misled by reading a wrong meaning into a word.

The trouble is that perfectly good words (that is, words whose meaning should be clear) gain more and more 'associations' as time goes on, until readers and listeners can never be quite sure what the writer or speaker is implying.

Here's an instance; a choir is going to contribute some items to a church Carol Service. Obviously it is fair enough to say that they are going to sing them. But to say that they are going to perform them might be thought inappropriate for such an event. Performances, the church people may feel, are what you get from amateur theatricals, rock bands, circuses, conjurers and big egos. Not quite what we go to church for. The church may have welcomed an audience for a choir on Saturday, but will be attended by a congregation and a choir on Sunday. Yet the word 'audience' means no more nor less than 'listeners'; and 'congregation' implies no more nor less than 'gathering together'. There is no essential reason why one should not speak of a congregation on the Saturday and an audience on the Sunday - except for the words' associations. We might even risk the term 'assembly' - but that has been hijacked by politics.

Our forefathers had hijacked a quite different word for what one does to a song - a word that to them must have sounded more dignified than 'performing' and more meaningful than the rather plain 'singing'. They liked a song to be 'rendered'. But we use the verb render for heating and purifying cooking fat. And look what happened to its noun 'rendition'. Render was never a very satisfactory word for 'performing', but now its associations have spoilt it entirely*.

Talking of parish priests (well, we were getting pretty close), it was not unusual a few generations ago for a clergyman to earn a reputation as a 'painful preacher'. This referred not to his excruciating delivery, or even to the way wooden benches seemed to get more and more uncomfortable the longer the sermon dragged on; but referred to the painstaking preparation of his 'addresses'. And even this last term now has associations with post-codes and websites. And minor traffic misdemeanours: I am afraid I must ask you for your name and address, sir.

* Though since first posting these paragraphs I have read in a high-quality national magazine of a much praised recent rendition of a piece of classical music.

Reading too much