Record-Breaker

Letters

Vol. 16 No. 22 · 24 November 1994

From James MacGibbon

I was pulled up sharply by Mary Hawthorne’s use of the fashionable buzzword ‘parameter’ in her review of The Informers by Bret Easton Ellis, when she wrote that he was ‘pushing to the limit the current parameters of literary transgression’ (LRB, 10 November). In the current edition of Sir Ernest Gowers’s Plain Words we are warned that it is ‘a mathematical term which, it is safe to say, not one in ten of those who use it understands’. The entry in the New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary confirms its complex meanings. In the above case one wonders if a simple word like ‘boundaries’ might not have been preferable. The point is possibly worth making because journalists are frequently employing the buzzword inappropriately, even to the extent of using it as an alternative to ‘perimeter’.

James MacGibbon
Manningtree, Essex