Wordwatch: Mitigate
Last month the former Chancellor George Osborne, discussing current affairs in the Spectator, declared: “One development I’m less worried about is a grand China/Russia axis. I’ve always suspected their long history of mutual suspicion mitigated against it.”
A mere slip of the typing hand, surely. Maybe even the fault of a spot of predictive text – we must always allow for automated error nowadays. But it’s a very common misunderstanding. Here’s an example from a piece on the eighteenth-century artist Paul Sandby written in 2015:
“[Views of Windsor Castle] constituted well over half of his submissions to the Society of Artists, where, to mitigate against the risk of boring his audience with sameness he presented a wide range of Windsor subjects …” (D H Solkin, Art in Britain 1660-1815 (2015). This is probably not a slip: there is a clear confusion between the two words.
They are in fact two quite different terms and associated ideas: to mitigate is to alleviate or lessen; to militate, as the word clearly suggests, is to oppose or fight against. The preposition “against” actually occurs in both these examples: the writer has added the preposition associated with one word, “militate”, trying to make sense of the other, “mitigate”, which doesn’t require it.
“Mitigate” derives from a Latin word meaning “mild” or “gentle”, and means “to render gentle, or less fierce”. The Oxford English Dictionary gives “alleviate” as a useful synonym. On the other hand, the military and aggressive content of “militate” is obvious. Misunderstandings of this type often stem from overlapping meanings, where the domain of a word can easily be elided with that of another. Here, though, it is simply the aural similarity of “militate” and “mitigate” that does it. This, in other words, is a true Malapropism – the use of one word in place of another that sounds similar.
Mrs Malaprop probably needs no introduction to this readership. But just to remind you: she is a character in Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s comedy The Rivals, first performed in London in 1775. She is voluble and prone to using words “mal à-propos“, that is, incorrectly.
Here’s a specimen from early in the play: “I would by no means wish a daughter of mine to be a progeny of learning … I would send her, at nine years old, to a boarding school, in order to learn a little ingenuity and artifice. … as she grew up, I would have her instructed in geometry, that she might know something of the contagious countries, but above all,… she should be a mistress of orthodoxy, that she might not mis-spell, and mis-pronounce words so shamefully as girls usually do; and likewise that she might reprehend the true meaning of what she is saying. This is what I would have a woman know; and I don’t think there is a superstitious article in it.”
Mrs Malaprop is a figure of fun, one of the best-known in all British drama. It was a stroke of genius on Sheridan’s part to magnify into classic comedy a commonplace error that is not usually particularly funny. It’s Mrs Malaprop’s pretensions to learning that make her laughable. But her name is immutably attached to the mistake, whoever commits it.
We all make such mistakes all the time, so we shouldn’t pass judgement. But perhaps we are permitted to laugh quietly when eminent public figures with literary aspirations are guilty of them.