The curse of modern English is verbosity. And what a needless curse. Why be long-winded when you could be short? Why say or write integrated multidisciplinary educational facility when all you mean is school? I’ve concocted that example, but almost any official or academic document holds others just as daft.

Who gains? The speaker/ writer? Conceivably, he may think it shows his expertise and an uncritical audience may agree. But I doubt if that is often the motive. The listener/reader? Manifestly not: he risks ending up more confused than informed. So why do it?

Nearly always, I suspect, there’s no motive at all; the cause is simple laziness. Plain English does not come easily; and if you’re steeped in jargon, as many academics and officials are, it’s less trouble to regurgitate it than to think of what you’re really trying to say and then, shortly, say it.

That’s not a complaint against jargon. In its place, it’s a way of saying briefly, among experts, things that would take a whole paragraph to spell out to the inexpert. There is good reason to use it — in one’s own area of expertise, to those also in the know. But not otherwise.

The curiosity is that there is one huge area of modern English which suffers from this curse far less than its equivalents in earlier centuries did: serious writing. Quite simply, today’s biographer, historian, essayist, novelist, even reporter writes shorter than his forebears did. And better.

Fifty-word sentences packed with subordinate clauses came naturally to the writers of the 19th century and earlier. Not just bad writers either. I love Macaulay’s essays, but my goodness, they take some ploughing through. Equally outdated, mercifully, is the sort of long-winded humour that called one’s nose (to cite George Borrow) one’s olfactory organ. Journalists used to love this sort of verbosity, even when no humour was intended. My local paper each week reprints excerpts from past editions. Reporting a fire in August 1807, it recorded that two people had fallen victim to the devouring element. A century later, trainee reporters were rightly warned not to write Jupiter Pluvius when what they meant was rain. Today’s hacks need no warning: if indeed they’d ever met the phrase, they’d be rudely asked by the chief subeditor why they’d dragged in Jupiter and what the hell did Pluvius mean.

Our ancestors, in books as in the press, were equally addicted to a different sort of verbosity: they wrote too much. Nineteenth-century novels were apt to be three-volume. Book reviews ran to thousands of words, reports of parliament to several columns. Outside the grey acres of the New York Times and New York Review of Books, you wouldn’t get away with that today.

In my view, rightly not. The famous headline, “Gotcha”, with which one British tabloid hailed the torpedoing of the Argentine cruiser Belgrano in 1982 provoked endless rage and long-winded editorials among those who think war is fought with paper darts and UN resolutions. It also expressed exactly what most Britons felt, and far more effectively than any editorial.

There’s a place for length in journalism, of course, as in any other writing. Back in the Sixties, some event led me to cable The Economist’s Singapore stringer for an 800-word story. Back came 1,500. The subsequent cabled exchange ran roughly thus:

Hugh-Jones to Harvey (such was his surname): WHY FIFTEEN HUNDRED WORDS WHEN ASKED EIGHT HUNDRED QUERY. Harvey to Hugh-Jones: ALL NEEDED VERY COMPLEX STORY. Hugh-Jones to Harvey: OH YEAH SEE BOOK GENESIS [the first of the Bible] ENTIRE STORY CREATION IN EIGHT HUNDRED. That’ll flatten him, I thought. He flattened me. Harvey to Hugh-Jones: YES AND NOTE CONFUSION EXACTLY WHAT HAPPENED EVER SINCE.

Still, I stick to my view. Shorter is better. Short is best.