Mind your language: On behalf of

Someone, so the Times reported, was asked about young people being unemployed. ‘The problem is not the lack of jobs,’ came the reply, ‘but a lack of determination on behalf of young jobseekers.’ What he meant was ‘on the part of young jobseekers’. It was they who lacked determination, not anyone else on their behalf.

This strange use of behalf has become so widespread that it is impossible to tell, out of context, what a speaker means. The new sense is ousting the old, just as bad money drives out good, as Gresham’s Law declares. The only difficulty is that perhaps the old money was never quite as good as it seemed.

There was a phrase, 100 years ago, in behalf of, meaning ‘in the interest of, for the benefit of’. This meaning, it seems to me, survives in one sense of on behalf of. Someone, for example, was accused of telling lies in court on behalf of Silvio Berlusconi. This doesn’t mean ‘lying instead of him’, but ‘for his benefit’.

A hundred years ago there was also the phrase on behalf of in the familiar sense of ‘instead of, as a representative of’. The Oxford English Dictionary complains: ‘In recent use we often find on behalf in the sense of in behalf, to the loss of an important distinction.’ That complaint was published in 1887, when the section of the dictionary containing behalf was first published. But the phrase ‘in recent use’ still remains in the current edition, even though it refers to a period at least 124 years ago. As far as I can tell in behalf of is now extinct.

For those who like language neat and unchanging, there is worse news. The meaning of on behalf of that I started this column finding fault with, ‘on one’s own part’, was happily in use between the age of Chaucer and that of Shakespeare, though obsolete by the 19th century.