Political confusion

This is NOT a political point but despair at a further example of the misuse and confusion about our language. One of our up and coming politicians, in quite an important and powerful government position as Chief Secretary to the Treasury, does not seem to know the difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion.

Danny Alexander, addressing the Liberal Democrat Conference on Sunday 19th September, said:

"tax avoidance and evasion are unacceptable in the best of times but in today's circumstances they are morally indefensible"
AND
"the Chancellor and I have agreed to invest 900 million pounds extra on a package of new measures to crack down on tax avoidance and evasion"

One would have thought it might be surprising but perhaps excusable in a member of parliament with an artistic speciality. According to HM Treasury's website, however, Danny Alexander has previously spent a number of years as a specialist communicator and has been a shadow Secretary for Work and Pensions and so hopefully is aware of our tax system.

For his information and that of any other members of HM Government, my understanding of the difference is:

1. Tax avoidance is the legal way of reducing one's tax liability within the existing tax rule framework.
2. Tax evasion is the illegal concealment of tax liability.

For further information search Google for 'define:tax evasion' and for the speech extract (a brief 1 minute 30 second video) see the BBC News page: Government crackdown on tax...

Rant over. I feel better now. Thank you.

The sad shorthand in our evolving language

I need to catalogue some stock that I have been passing over for some time and this morning I was flicking through an early edition of Byron’s ‘The Bride of Abydos’. I found that one of the leaves was marked with an oval ink stamp ‘ex libris vibira pinto’. Not being aware of ‘vibira pinto’ I Googled the whole phrase (as one does).

Most of the links presented to me had matched with ‘ex libris’ and I followed several of them. I was sad to find that, on internet at least, ‘ex libris’ was defined in several as ‘a bookplate’ which seems rather like putting the cart before the horse.

I may be wrong (my latin instruction was over fifty years ago and I was never very attentive) but I have always understood ‘ex libris’ to mean ‘from the books of’ or ‘from the library of’, ex being the preposition ‘out of’ and libris being the ablative plural form of liber or book. Since bookplates began it has frequently appeared on them accompanied by the owners name as a reminder that the book has an owner and should be returned.

That ‘ex libris’ has come to mean a bookplate is a very lazy supposition. There is already a perfectly good word for that ownership label, it is 'bookplate'. Just because many different bookplates have the common phrase ‘ex libris’ written or printed on them does not mean that it can be translated as ‘bookplate’. It is like saying that ‘no waiting’ means a metal sign at the side of the road.

Such shortcuts don’t improve our language and many of them debase it. It strikes me that the above is an example or should I use another and say ‘a for instance’?