Growth and decay words for institutions and attitudes, including entrenched, the most useful word in this chapter.
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Two words for the same durable attitude. One of them has also passed judgement and predicted the future.
Attitudes to disability in the workplace are well established.
Attitudes to disability in the workplace are deeply entrenched.
Both say the attitudes have been around a long time. Both are correct English.
What has the second one added? There are two things, not one.
The chapter's best single word, and the two decline words that mean different things.
Because of what it compresses. Consider the plain version:
These attitudes have persisted for decades, several attempts to change them have failed, and I regard that as a bad thing.
Twenty-two words. Now:
These attitudes are deeply entrenched.
Five. And every part of the long version reaches the reader: duration, resistance to change, and mild disapproval.
It is also collocationally generous — deeply entrenched, firmly entrenched, become entrenched, entrenched interests, entrenched inequality, entrenched positions are all ordinary — and its picture is dead enough that it rarely clashes with anything.
If a candidate learns one item from Chapter 5, it should be this one.
The one caution is the Chapter 1 caution: the disapproval has to be earned. Entrenched asserts that attempts to change the thing have failed or would fail, and a paragraph that has not shown that has made a claim on credit.
Six situations, six stages of a life. The stage is the meaning.
Terms
Definitions
Six situations. Twice the honest answer is the plain word, because no stage has been established.
For each situation, ask two questions: which stage is this? and is the cause the one the word requires?
In two of the six the plain word is correct — because the thing got smaller for a reason that is neither disuse nor a supply being withdrawn, or because nothing has resisted anything.
Attitudes to a practice have not shifted in forty years, and three separate campaigns to change them have failed. Which word?
Three chains. Ask whether the thing got smaller, and if so what caused it.
Chain 1
The situation: productivity in the sector was at the same level in 2022 as in 2012. It did not fall.
Candidates: stagnated / atrophied
Step 1 — Did the thing get smaller, or stay the same size?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: Productivity in the sector has for a decade.
Chain 2
The situation: after the last foundry closed, nobody in the town practised the casting trades. Thirty years later the knowledge is effectively gone. Nobody removed it; it simply stopped being used.
Candidates: withered / atrophied
Step 1 — Was a supply withdrawn, or did the thing fall out of use?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: The town's casting skills gradually .
Chain 3
The situation: a rural bus network lost a third of its routes after a competitor undercut it and two operators went bankrupt. You want the accurate verb.
Candidates: withered / declined
Step 1 — Does the cause match what either stage word requires?
Step 2 — Therefore the expert writes: The rural network sharply over five years.