So many will-o’-the-wisps

There was a general howl of derision. Government detectives naturally do not care to take advice from private ones. They distrust them, and look upon them as so many will-o’-the-wisps (intentional ones, often) in that swamp of crime on which the policeman’s bull’s-eye sheds its certain radiance.

J.M.W. van der Poorten Schwartz – The Black Box Murder (1889)

J.M.W. van der Poorten Schwartz, pen name Maarten Maartens, was a Dutch writer who wrote in English. One of many writers whose popularity faded to almost nothing after they died. In the quote above, he describes Scotland Yard detectives as government detectives which in a sense they were and still are, just as we could refer to the police as the government police.

Not that it matters in the context of a late Victorian crime novel, but today we tend to avoid the word ‘government’ in other contexts too. We refer to state education rather than government education, and state schools rather than government schools. We don’t refer to the meals provided by school breakfast clubs as government breakfasts, but we could.

The BBC is the British Broadcasting Corporation rather than the Government Broadcasting Corporation and we don’t refer to BBC News as Government News even though we could do so accurately enough. We don’t refer to BBC entertainment as Government entertainment either.

The NHS is the National Health Service rather than the Government Illness Service and NHS hospitals are not referred to as government hospitals even though that’s what they are. Instead we pretend they are more independent of government than they are.

This is not to say that a change of language would be worthwhile because we’d adapt to new terms anyway. Yet it is worth noting that we tend to veil the vast, monolithic nature of government in various terms which aren’t euphemisms for the Leviathan that is modern government, but aren’t as close to it as they could be.

For example, we could take another small step and refer to all the main UK political parties as government parties representing the permitted shades of political outlook. Instead, we pretend the parties are more independent of government than they are.