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Increase your vocabulary and you’ll make your writing much more precise. That’s why I provide a word of the week. Today’s word: suborned…
I’d heard the word a million or so times (probably in every episode of Law & Order I ever watched) but I still didn’t know the meaning of suborned.
It typically appears in a sentence going something like this: “He was accused of conspiring to suborn witnesses.” Most recently, however, I saw it in a sentence from John LeCarré’s memoir Pigeon Tunnel. (In fact, his book even made my list of the 50 best memoirs from the last 25 years.) Here’s how LeCarré used it:
My writers were being shadowed, their phones were being tapped, their cars and houses bugged, neighbours suborned.
The verb means to induce someone to do an unlawful thing or to induce someone to commit perjury (or to obtain perjured testimony from a witness.)
