A word nudging its way into the finals for the most pointless cliché of the year is granular.
A word nudging its way into the finals for the most pointless cliché of the year is granular. It appeals to those who adopt the languages of public policy and business management.
An article in the Daily Telegraph about the FSA (the Financial Services Authority, not the Food Standards Agency) said: ‘The regulator would like to see reporting that is sufficiently granular to allow exposures on high-risk instruments.’ As this example suggests, granular often means ‘detailed’. Sometimes it seems not to mean anything. An article in the Guardian about local news said: ‘Ofcom should look at trying it in a region like ours to see if it can work on a more granular basis.’ I suppose here ‘on a more granular basis’ means ‘in particular places’.
For most of my life the most common thing to be granulated has been sugar, although I’m told that melted pig iron used to be granulated by being scattered by a wheel into a cistern of water. It sounds fun.
Men of my husband’s generation can still be heard to come out with phrases like cum grano salis, though sometimes they get the termination of grano wrong, (just as James Naughtie the other morning in a moment of stress said ‘prima facia’, as if it were a shop-front or fascia). The big Oxford English Dictionary says that cum grano salis is sometimes reduced to cum grano, but I cannot remember having heard this. It sounds rather 19th-century. In the 16th century, the hard, Protestant reformer, Bishop Jewel provided an alternative English version: ‘We must understand this authoritie with a corne of salt.’
He was right that granum means a single grain of corn. We are here on the territory of the most ancient origins of our language, since corn and granum and grain all come from an Indo-European stem, meaning ‘worn down’.
Grains of truth and the grain in wood come from the same source. One kind of grain, grains of paradise, is an old name (from the time of Chaucer until the 19th century) for cardamom, one of those spices so prized in the Middle Ages that merchants made their fortunes on one laden ship from Malabar and the far Indies. Six centuries ago, that chatty Vicar of Berkeley in Gloucestershire, John Trevisa, passed on some advice that can come in handy at this time of year: ‘Cardomomum helpyth agenst wamblyng and indygnacyon of the stomak.’ Like all of us who care about language, it has much to wamble and be indignant about.
Comments