Bournemouth Latin Ban
People in Bournemouth are too ignorant to understand 'vice versa' and 'status quo'. At least that is what their City Council believes. It has told its staff not to use phrases like those because "not everyone knows Latin." Nineteen 'Latin terms' are no longer acceptable in documents or when communicating with the illiterate British public.
Bournemouth City Council and various other British local authorities are being aided and abetted in their mission to clean up the English language by the Plain English Campaign which says: "It is important to remember that the national literacy level is about 12 years old and the vast majority of people hardly ever use these terms." Even if this is true (whatever it means), it hardly seems good reason to take words out of the language. Who do these linguistic vandals think they are? If they get their way, the national literacy level will soon be down to 10 years old, then 8, then 6, as they turn their attention to French terms like 'cul-de-sac', 'en route', 'nom de plume', and 'je ne sais quoi'.
Coming from the nation of William Shakepeare, this is an outrageous abuse of public office. It's also nonsensical in that the justification used by the Councillors in Bournemouth for banning non-English terms is that not everyone has English as their first language. But where's the logic? Does that mean they wouldn't ban 'foreign' terms if English was everyone's first language? And as the Telegraph's Gerald Warner says, Latin is the root of so many European languages.
The Telegraph has also published the list of banned Latin terms and the 'English' replacements to be used instead. One must hope the staff of Bournemouth City Council have the wit to ignore the instructions of their Barbarian employers. And they're still ok to use 'ad nauseam' and 'non compos mentis', plus, as one would expect, the Council's motto 'Pulchritudo et Salubritas'.
