Sectioned and Classified

One category of new words - or of new usages of old words, actually - is professional jargon that gradually becomes absorbed into general use. Two examples of this cropped up recently, and I wondered how many readers or hearers would be aware of the significance, or even just the meaning, of the terms.

The first was a reference to the possibility that a certain person might be 'sectioned'. We all know the noun 'section'; it means a bit, a slice, a portion of something, doesn't it ? Oh yes, and it can mean part of a book or a written article or an Act of Parliament. Or even, in the USA (so my old Shorter Oxford English Dictonary tells me), 'a portion of a sleeping car containing two berths'. But its use as a verb - to 'section' someone - does not appear in that 50-year-old edition. But the 2007 edition of the SOED tells us that 'to section' may mean 'to cause a person to be compulsorily detained in a psychiatric hospital in accordance with the relevant section of the Mental Health Act'.

We might guess that some 70 per cent of the English-speaking world will have no idea of this use of the term, and that of the remainder, 20 per cent might know roughly what it signifies, while only 9 per cent will know just why the word 'section' is used. This leaves space for a hypothetical 1 per cent who know that the Mental Health Act concerned is that enacted by parliament in 1983, superseding that of 1959. (I can't claim to have been one of this 1 per cent until this afternoon). This use of 'to section' will have been coined by doctors, psychiatrists, nurses and lawyers: the general public just has to catch up on it.

Similarly, we were shown on our local TV news programme a couple of days ago some of the large collection of aerial photographs of the awful inundation of the sea over the East Anglian coast in 1953. The pictures had not been made public before, said the presenter, since some of them had been 'classified'. No explanation of this usage was offered. To classify something is essentialy 'to assign it to a particular class', just as Peking Man and the Neanderthals are, together with us, classified as hominids. But just because certain documents were, during the second world war, 'classified' by government officials as secret, the rest of us have ever since had to work out the significance of the jargon (imported from USA) for ourselves. Not that this is necessarily an offence against the English language: but it illustrates how specialist terminology (a polite way of saying 'jargon') tends to be off-loaded on to us commoners without our really knowing what it's all about.

Sectioned and Classified