Here’s a modish metaphor that is dead but hasn’t stopped breeding: ‘If I had taken cannabis, I would be transparent about it,’ said Mr David Blunkett, the Home Secretary. ‘I want a transparent, non-variable law on drugs.’ And here’s another specimen caught in the verbal butterfly net of Mr Francis Radcliffe of York, who sent it in, chloroformed and set on a pin: ‘We need a transparent set of vocational qualifications,’ says Mr Mike Tomlinson, the educationist.
First, let us admit that Shakespeare used it. ‘Transparent Helena, nature shewes art,/That through thy bosome makes me see thy heart,’ we find in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. And if transparent could mean ‘open, ingenuous’, it could as easily mean ‘seen through’, as in a transparent knave.
The word transparent has been with us in its literal sense since the 15th century.
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