Wordwatch: Rendition
In the latest issue of The Week, I found an account of an unusual – and highly topical – cultural event that was I’m sure uplifting into the bargain: “The great American cellist Yo Yo Ma celebrated receiving his second dose of the coronavirus vaccine by giving an impromptu concert … The 65-year-old … performed renditions of pieces by Bach and Schubert … to enthusiastic rounds of applause.”
Nothing remarkable about any of that, you may say. I would guess, though, that when Yo Yo Ma was growing up sixty years ago, the word ‘rendition’ in the sense used here was an almost exclusively American term. In British English it had a time-honoured technical sense, signifying the handing over, or surrendering, of a city under siege, or the giving up of an individual (or group of individuals) in a formal exchange, for instance under military circumstances. For ‘performing’ or ‘interpreting’, we had a separate word: ‘rendering’. It was in America that ‘rendition’ had come to be used, as in my quote, to describe performances of music.
Over the last few decades, I’ve watched the steady, and as usual quite rapid, assimilation of the American sense into everyday British English. It’s now commonplace on the BBC’s Radio 3 in discussions of classical performance (where, I note, instrumentalists are beginning to be billed as ‘on piano’ or ‘on clarinet’, as though they were playing jazz). I would say that it has become common to the point of being universal, so much so that it has more or less eclipsed ‘rendering’, which we hardly ever hear now.
Interestingly, the old meaning of ‘rendition’, with its military overtones, gained a new lease of life in the first decade of this century, when the American authorities began to use it in an official phrase connected with President Bush’s ‘war on terror’. The formulation now was ‘extraordinary rendition’, denoting the extraditing of suspected terrorists to places where they stood a serious chance of being tortured. It has given new legitimacy to the old term and endowed it with a rather different, and on the whole sinister, meaning.
To avoid any such connotations, I’d like to see a revival of our own ‘rendering’, which for my money is easier on the ear, and has a civilising effect on any sentence it occurs in.