Banning jargon? Er, inexecutable Prime Minister

There is a wonderful moment in Born in Exile (1892), George Gissing’s great late-Victorian novel of religious doubt and social advancement, when the hero, Godwin Peak, comes across a man with whom, some years before, he went to college in a Midlands town. Naturally, in the interval their paths have diverged – Peak is an embittered, class-conscious free-thinker; the Rev Bruno Chilvers, as he is now styled, a fashionable and ambitious clergyman. Even more of a distinction, though, is offered