ABSTRACT
That interpolation about language, reality and the sense of death was prompted by the touching and uncynical efforts of St James’s Hospital to soften the outlines of the hard and puzzling reality of which it has to be professionally fully aware. Yet the power of the ‘ise’ words ––not only –‘humanise’ and ‘personalise’ but ‘privatise’ and ‘customise’ and all the others which point towards a humanity which is felt to be slipping from us – their force suggests that we are denying the power of language. Words worry us because life worries us, and we worry at language so as to the worry of life; usually by linguistic evasion. Strange the assumed power of names, no matter how obviously imposed, invented to suggest ‘personalisation’; another trick and its concomitant word wholly of the late twentieth century.
