PLAIN

PLAIN. A term for direct and unambiguous language: ‘Speketh so pleyn at this tyme, I yow preye, / That we may understonde what ye seye’ ( Chaucer, the Host speaking to the Clerk of Oxford in The Canterbury Tales); The Complete Plain Words (title of a British usage manual by Sir Ernest Gowers, 1954). Plain has been used since the late Middle Ages to contrast with ornate, academic, technical, Latinate, etc., and phrases such as plain English, plain language, plain style have been used to contrast with such expressions as double Dutch, gobbledygook, jargon, and mumbo jumbo. The contrast of plain style with other styles of language originates in ancient Greece and Rome, when RHETORIC recognized three styles: the grand or high style, the middle style, and the plain or low style, each appropriate to certain audiences, occasions, and purposes. The grand declamatory style was suited to high themes, people, and occasions (with the risk of becoming grandiose), the moderate middle style was suited to instruction and education (with the risk of becoming bland or pedantic), and the simple style was suited to ordinary life and public speaking (with the risk of becoming coarse, colourless, or patronizing). During the Renaissance and Reformation (15–16c), styles tended to polarize between the classical, academic, and ornate on the one side and the popular, vernacular, and plain on the other, a division that mirrored religious disputes. Protestants, especially of the ‘Low Church’ in England, favoured Puritan plain style and Quaker plain language in their worship, speech, and writing. Both forms influenced the development of prose writing in the British Isles, North America, and elsewhere. See ANGLO-SAXON, COMPLETE PLAIN WORDS, SAXONISM.