Pedants' corner - Refutations and denials

On Wednesday, Geoffrey Boycott said that he refuted all allegations of girlfriend-battering that were made against him. On Thursday, Mr Clinton, according to this newspaper "refuted charges of having an affair with Monica Lewinsky". It's enough to make a pedant despair. Neither Mr Clinton nor Sir Geoffrey refuted anything at all. They denied, they repudiated, they rejected, they rebuffed - but they didn't refute.

To refute means, as any good dictionary will tell you, to prove wrong. A dictionary whose standards are slipping may also mention the "colloquial" usage of "refute" as meaning "deny". But is this really one of those words on which we linguistic purists should surrender?

When Fowler wrote his Modern English Usage in 1926, he gave one brief paragraph to the word "refute", quoting the following sentence: "He sharply refuted the suggestion and said that he could produce ample evidence that it was wholly without foundation". Fowler's terse comment was: "He could refute the suggestion only by producing the evidence; till then he could only deny it."

Despite this clear advice, however, by the time Robert Burchfield came to revise Fowler in 1996, a considerably expanded entry was needed. After explaining "the traditional meaning" of refute, Burchfield says: "At some point in the second half of the 20th century, however, traditionalists began to notice that people outside an educated social divide were beginning to use refute as a simple synonym of deny. He quotes an enraged letter to the Spectator in 1986: "In Mr Chancellor's day someone who didn't know the difference between `refute' and `deny' wouldn't have been employed by the Spectator as an office cleaner, let alone as a television critic."

The skirmishing continues, says Burchfield. "The likelihood that the new use represents a legitimate semantic shift is rejected by the traditionalists. Those who have no idea what a semantic shift might be, like the sound of refute, and will continue to use it in its partially standard new way. I have an uneasy feeling that the new sense will begin to sound normal in the 21st century - but not yet."

So what should we, proudly standing on the right side of the socio-linguistic tracks, and on first name terms with any number of semantic shifts, do about misused refutations? We have three options:

1) Wince and bear it, accepting, as Burchfield appears to, that the battle is all but lost. Until the final defeat, our own refutations will, of course, still be accompanied with all the necessary paperwork, but we shall do no more than sigh when others refute when they should be simply denying.

2) Fight on, insisting that the distinction between refute and deny is too important to be blurred. We do not need another word meaning the same as "deny", but we ought not to deny ourselves a word with the original meaning of "refute". Even "rebut" does not quite have the force of "refute". After a rebuttal (denial with argument), the rally might continue. A refutation should be absolute.

3) Adopt the course advocated by Chambers Guide to Grammar and Usage which advises "To avoid ambiguity ... it is necessary either to avoid the word refute altogether, or to make sure that there is sufficient information in the rest of the passage to make the intended meaning clear."

The following argument, I think, refutes both 1) and 3): In a few months' time President Clinton may appear in court to answer an allegation, from Ms Paula Jones, that his penis is curved. He will probably deny it. But just think of the shock if he refutes it. It really is an important difference.