Should I use the term vis-à-vis? How should I decide when to use/avoid a term?

Question

I wrote a vision statement for a project using the term vis-à-vis (All X investments should be justified vis-à-vis quantified gain). A colleague suggested I shouldn't use vis-à-vis, and prefer simpler verbiage like "in relation to".

The colleague is a native English speaker, I'm not (nor a French speaker). I'd like to write clearly, but also not too drily. I thought vis-à-vis is perfectly fine, and seems to appear commonly enough in Google search results.

Would you recommend vis-à-vis for a global corporate-English speaking audience? And how would you recommend I check these things in the future?

Answer 1

Showing Off:

This is old-fashioned and unfortunately kind of high-brow. Depending on the audience, they are likely to just not get it/understand, and you risk sounding pretentious. Unless you're trying to impress your reader with the sophistication of your writing, it probably is better to avoid this. It is, however, technically correct. In the right circumstances, it could work.

This is one of those language uses that is very dependent on using the language to convey meaning rather than words. English is full of this messy stuff, and it makes English a beautiful, colorful language. It also makes English a huge pain in the butt.

This might be a better question for English SE, and perhaps that might be a better resource for future similar questions.

Answer 2

Vis-a-vis has multiple meanings, which are:

• in relation to (if used as preposition)
• opposed to (if used as an adverb)
• face to face meeting (if used as a noun)
• a counterpart (if used as a noun)

Deciphering which one you meant, especially for someone who is not perfectly fluent (and many natives as well), might be a nightmare.

There is a reason we try to use simple straightforward English in business settings, and that reason is to reach a broad and diverse audience with varying levels of fluency in the English language and present information in an easily digestible manner.

If I was forced to read flowery business prose containing gems like this, I'd probably silently curse the author and would not give him a nice review. Want to use language like that? Write fiction!

I do love to read and listen to Shakespeare and Poe, but that does not mean I like to stop reading every business proposal to Google the meanings of phrases used.

Business English (aside from marketing and corporate-speak) is there to be simple and to the point, to give you a clear image without the need of being fluent in English.

It's basically there to be a step up from pidgin English and waving your hands frantically to simulate your need for water/food/currency exchange/your desire to build a new oil platform off the coast of Belize...

That is, sadly, my definition for it.

But man proposes, nature disposes and in the end, the business communication will use whatever it can get away with.

Are you writing a document for a company of English language majors, you yourself being one?

Go on, let them know of your knowledge of the Queen's English.

Are you a Chinese businessman who built himself up from a store clerk to a head of a multinational corporation?

Use English first-graders in Central Europe would be chastised for.

In the end, what you can and can not use will be shaped out of your own limitations and the limitations of your audience.

Answer 3

Most answers so far have not addressed this specific context, and instead are addressing use of this phrase in writing more generally.

Vis-à-vis is not unusual as a piece of corporate jargon, and would not seem out of place in material produced for a global corporate-English speaking audience.

That said, use of jargon often serves to strengthen existing structural imbalances (only those already in the field have had the opportunity to learn the jargon, which then enables them to proceed more efficiently, progressing faster) & runs the risk of sounding buzzword-y; so it is usually advisable to avoid it where reasonably possible.

So, in this particular case, I don't think it would be especially out of place, or inappropriate to use, but using an alternative is probably still preferable.

Answer 4

Depending on circumstance I probably would use vis-à-vis. But not, as has been pointed out, for a foreign audience.

I once had someone complain about a sign I printed for him: Mater Misericordæ

Me: It's not a printing problem. It's a Latin vowel.

Him: Why the hell are you using Latin vowels?

Me: They're Latin words.

Him: What?! It's the name of a [censored] hospital!

Me: The use of Latin is traditional in medicine. That sign says "Mother of Mercy" in Latin. The last letter is a diphthong. A diphthong is two vowels run together without a consonant between them-

Him: [censored] me! I hire a computer person and get a foreign language expert. Look, the hospital administrators aren't going to understand. Print it again with a bit less university, OK?

Answer 5

I disagree with several of the previous answers on this specific phrase--which I find perfectly natural and ordinary, and would expect most speakers to understand. (Even just from context, on the off chance they hadn't seen it before.) But clearly there is some variance among different speakers' idiolects vis-a-vis this phrase... If there's a lesson here, it's to expect & be more accepting of variation in other speakers.

But I think the useful part of this question goes beyond taking a survey about a particular turn of phrase. The larger lesson is that you should always strive to be very precise in the message conveyed by your writing. Yes, even at the level of word choice, even at the level of prepositions. And especially in presentations, section headings, topic sentences, etc., which need to be both pithy and precise.

That's the real failing of your example sentence: All X investments should be justified vis-à-vis quantified gain. Sure, you could replace "vis-a-vis" with "in regards to". But that doesn't make the relationship any more precise--you're just saying 'these things are somehow related.' I expect you really mean that the investments need to be justified by some quantified gain. If you're trying to express a necessary and causal relationship, it gets obscured by the choice of preposition. So you're probably better off with something like "Every X investment must be justified by a quantified gain" or "The gain from every X investment should be quantifiable" or something else that more closely captures the exact meaning you want to express.

The real concern is not just "Will my audience understand the words I use?"--though that is of course essential--it is also "Do the words I'm using accurately convey my meaning?"