Elegant Variation - Examples

Examples

In The King's English (1908), Fowler gives as one of his examples this passage from The Times:

• "The Emperor received yesterday and to-day General Baron von Beck... It may therefore be assumed with some confidence that the terms of a feasible solution are maturing themselves in His Majesty's mind and may form the basis of further negotiations with Hungarian party leaders when the Monarch goes again to Budapest."

Fowler objected to this passage because The Emperor, His Majesty, and the Monarch all refer to the same person: "the effect", he pointed out in Modern English Usage, "is to set readers wondering what the significance of the change is, only to conclude that there is none." Elegant variation is still common in modern journalism, where, for example, a "fire" often becomes a "blaze" or a "conflagration" with no clear justification, and it is considered particularly problematic in legal, scientific, and technical writing, where avoiding ambiguity is important.

• Among sub-editors at The Guardian, "gratuitous synonyms" are called "Povs": an acronym of "popular orange vegetables", a phrase removed from the draft of an article about carrots in the Liverpool Echo. Charles W. Morton similarly wrote of '"Elongated Yellow Fruit" writing', from a synonym for "banana" used in the Boston Transcript.
• Another bad example in a newspaper was "the red-headed non-driver" to avoid repeating the name "Mrs. Thatcher".
• Fowler also quoted from one Thackeray who wrote about a boxing match: "At the sixth round, there were almost as many fellows shouting out 'Go it, Figs', as there were youths exclaiming 'Go it, Cuff'." Were older men supporting Figs and teenagers supporting Cuff? Or not?
• Fowler described an article in the Westminster Gazette which, in 20 lines describing a sale of pictures, used eleven apparent synonyms for 'sold for x amount of money'; some of those synonyms may have implied varying success at the sale, some not.
• In a BBC TV report in March 2005: "Kabul had just fallen ... he brought a satellite in ... (the road was impassable to wheeled traffic, so) he broke down and carried it on donkeys ... with his load on 35 mules ...": with "mule" and "donkey" used as elegant-variation synonyms although they are different sorts of animals.
• Another elegant variation nuisance can happen with dates: e.g. replacing "1947 1963" by "1947 sixteen years later", forcing the reader to ferret back through the text for the previous date, and then do arithmetic to find the date. This can also cause ambiguity: "1947 sixteen years later twenty years later" may mean "1947 1963 1983" or "1947 1963 1967".

*Confusion can result in cases that look like elegant variation but are not, for example:

• • A newspaper sub-editor accustomed to replacing "game" by "match" or "bout" to avoid word repeats may get into error with tennis where a game is not the same as a match; likewise in cricket a draw (game ran out of time) is not the same as a tie (game finished, same number of runs each).
  • In a local election for councillors, "Party A won" is not the same as "Party B lost", even if no other participating parties had hope of winning, because there also is the "hung" condition where no one party has 50% or more of the seats.