See-through

He’s not the only one who’s impatient with transparent and transparency. Both T-words have surged in popularity in the past 15 years or so, and they’ve made it onto several pet-peeve lists. But the figurative meaning of transparent is not a cause for complaint; it may be odd, when you look at it closely, but it isn’t new and it isn’t wrong.

It’s true that the first sense of transparent is clear, penetrable by light, and thus “invisible” the way a clean window is invisible. But its figurative meanings - “easily seen through, recognized,” “obvious” and “frank, open, candid” - are more than 400 years old, says the Oxford English Dictionary, which quotes Shakespeare’s “transparent heretics” (1592).

A writer’s style can be transparent, or clear; a person can be transparent, or guileless; flattery can be transparent , or obvious. All these figurative uses, it’s true, involve a displacement of the adjective: If you call a motive or a style transparent, you don’t mean that you see through it, but that you see it clearly, as if any (real or hypothetical) obstruction is transparent. This might be an instance of the figure of speech called hypallage, or “displaced epithet” - as in “weary night,” “hopeful morning,” or T.S. Eliot’s “forgetful snow.” But whatever you call it, the usage is standard.

So if you want to hate transparent, you should complain not of its figurative uses but of its new voguishness - its popularity as a description of what governments and banks and businesses should be, in an ideal world.

Transparent and transparency fit nicely into the category of “vogue words” as H.W. Fowler defined it in “Modern English Usage” (1926). Vogue words aren’t necessarily novel or slangy; many are everyday terms turned fashionable, perhaps because they’ve found a new niche in the lexicon. Some young writers, said Fowler, may not even recognize that certain usages are trendy, and thus “repulsive to the old & the well-read.”