Daniel Thwaites | A pandemic of ‘persons’

Alongside this pandemic of the Wuhan flu another viral disturbance has infected the country. And unlike COVID-19 where the paucity of testing leaves us guessing about infection rates, this other virulent virus has got almost everyone.

I’m banging on about this annoying habit adopted by every public official and everyone trying to sound like one, of abusing the word ‘persons’.

It’s as if our collective capacity to distinguish, mention, refer to, comment on, allude to, or discuss anything human with specificity is being obliterated by this plague of ‘persons’. Aside from words like ‘and’, ‘it’, ‘the’, and ‘they’, it must easily be the most abused word in the country’s official-speak.

To illustrate, and here I’m using categories recently referred to as generic ‘persons’ by the chattering classes, please note that nowadays on the island of Jamaica, all individuals, commuters, shoppers, consumers, readers, householders, farmers, higglers, workers, audience members, drinkers, smokers, sports fans, bike riders, car drivers, dog owners, bank tellers, bank customers, taxpayers, healthcare workers, nurses, and medical patients have ALL become ‘persons’.

What’s the better way to do things? Although the abuse of ‘persons’ is by no means limited to its misuse as the plural of ‘person’, let me touch on that as a first step in trying to beat the word back into relative obscurity. The detached formality lurking behind its use is the speciality of civil-servant-speak, or bureaucratese, which might soon have to be declared another language.

First off, the most important thing is that it grates in the ear like chalk screeching on a blackboard. If it doesn’t bother you at least a little bit, that’s a signal you need help. But for those who want more backup, the AP Stylebook states: “The word people is preferred to persons in all plural uses.” The New York Times Manual of Style and Usage agrees. It states bluntly: “Use people as the plural of person.”

Consider this from the Grammarist:

“In modern English, people is the de facto plural of person. People and person have separate Latin origins, and they came to English at different times by different paths … Persons was the original plural … but it prevails only in a few contexts, most notably law and law enforcement …”

So is that it? Officialdom has adopted the idiom of lawyers and police in an act of snobbery? Does that explain why ‘persons’ has spread faster than coronavirus?

A quick side note for whoever thinks the real estate on The Gleaner’s editorial page is some sacred space and that this irritating carbuncle that has grown up on our public language isn’t worth noting. You are very mistaken. Paying attention to their language is among the surest ways to discern what is, or more appropriately, what is not, going on in the heads of our masters.

Phenomenon

And here’s my take on that. There’s this phenomenon in organisations, political parties and businesses alike, where everyone swimming further down the food chain begins to talk like the head of the stream. It’s the default of weak characters and weak minds, and that could explain, perhaps, why ‘person’ has become omnipresent. Some prince or princess of officialdom started speaky-spokying like that and it spread and stuck. I won’t even bother to speculate where, though if pushed I have some culprits that need investigation.

Or the overuse and abuse could have begun because of some pressure to sound ‘official’, and that being such a hugely valuable asset in the cacophony of our public spaces, it just caught fire. After that, nobody would want to appear like one of those crazy language hippies who might use another word to talk about human beings. God forbid!

I see it as of a piece with forcing women to wear sleeves to enter a Government building, and the horsehair wig that Pearnel Sr wears as Speaker of the House.

Either way, what this proliferation of ‘persons’ tells us is that there are a lot of empty heads and copycat sheep talking into the microphones all over this place. Furthermore, it tells us that they are apt to uncritically follow fashion and behave like monkeys and parrots.

The current protocol seems to be: use ‘persons’ wherever and whenever possible, and ignore any other more suitable or appropriate option. Here is Minister Tufton on the Jodian Fearon case:

“There are presently 114 cases in hospital as at Sunday, April 26, 2020. These persons have been transferred between different hospitals based on the availability of spaces, severity of illness and resources.”

Before that, on Twitter, the health minister had published: “No person should ever be denied access to healthcare.”

I like the sentiment. But couldn’t ‘person’ have been the simpler ‘No one’, or ‘Nobody’, or even ‘No individual’? Even better would have been, “Jodian Fearon should never have been denied access to healthcare.” Or, best of all, “Jodian Fearon should have received proper healthcare but did not.”

Plague of ‘persons’

But that would be plain speaking and would have removed the air of officialdom and patina of solemnity. And by the way, Minister Tufton’s language is here used just as an illustration, because although he suffers badly from this plague of ‘persons’, he’s certainly not alone. It’s just that he and the PM are world-class offenders and have been doing a lot of press conferences. For those of you who need comforting on this score I hasten to say that it’s no better and perhaps marginally worse on the other side. Persons, persons, persons!

This is a rigid formality so often found in the half-witted and semi-literate spreading to people who are definitely neither of those. It is, in a microcosm, something I witnessed repeatedly as a youth, that if someone was unaccustomed to putting pen to paper, he would occasion any writing opportunity with a flourish of ceremony and excessive formalism.

The first occasion was when I had to give a recorded statement to a policeman. He opened up the massive station book, sniffed and snorted, creased the page carefully seven or eight times, checked his pen a dozen times, arranged his shirt and sleeves, tensed and relaxed his shoulders, made sure his water was placed correctly, adjusted his tie, reviewed that his hair was properly combed, shoes shined, throat cleared, neck relaxed, all before slowly and painfully painting out the statement at exactly one word per minute. It’s the same with speaking. And hence: ‘persons’.

Lemme be clear: I have low expectations, so I don’t expect this rubbish to stop. Except perhaps that it will peter out naturally. Or it could suffocate at the hands of the patwa people, along with their three friends up at UWI who want us all speaking Jamieken or whatever and spelling it according to some nonsense dictionary they also invented. At that time, we may only be permitted to say ‘smaddy’ for the singular, ‘dem’ for the plural, and ‘pipple’ for the aggregate. But honestly, that would be preferable to what obtains now, this insufferable pandemic of ‘persons’.

- Daniel Thwaites is an attorney at law. Email feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com.