Advertisement

Mea Culpa: time for a wake-up call about the use of cliches

Jeremy Corbyn unveils the Labour battle bus on the general election campaign trail in Liverpool, 7 November: PA
Jeremy Corbyn unveils the Labour battle bus on the general election campaign trail in Liverpool, 7 November: PA

I confess I used the phrase “wake-up call” in a radio interview during the election campaign. It is harder than it looks to avoid cliches when speaking, but the whole point of written journalism is that you have the chance, the extra few seconds, to take them out.

We usually do, but one crept in to our review of the world’s top 15 heavyweight boxers, in which we said Andy Ruiz “remains a dangerous opponent who may just have had the wake-up call he needed to take the next step up”.

It is none of my business, really, but I do wonder why we report on boxing at all. I don’t think it should be on TV, and if it weren’t on TV then the argument that a lot of people watch it wouldn’t apply. In any case, there are probably a lot of people who would watch bear-baiting if it were on.

I’m not in favour of banning boxing. My neurosurgeon neighbour rightly pointed out that it would be more dangerous if it were driven underground. But get it off the TV and it will fade into the irrelevance it deserves.

Clichewatch: Now that the election is over, all those political cliches can be cast into the outer darkness. I have had enough of throwing people under the bus, dog whistles, pork barrels and broad churches. We tended to use them only when quoting participants in the election battle, or in articles by them – Chuka Umunna, for example, referred to minority communities being thrown under the bus in his latest column for us. But I shall be glad to see the back of them anyway.

Problematising: Every now and again I mutter to myself in this column about the word “problematic” and it doesn’t make any difference, but it makes me feel better. We used it 10 times last week, a search of the computer database tells me.

We described a stadium in China as an “even more problematic venue” for football than the Khalifa International Stadium in Qatar. It seems to be a way of saying “it makes liberal westerners feel they ought to be boycotting it” without having to go into the specifics of China’s human rights record, but it might show we mean it if we mention Tibet or the oppression of the Uighurs.

Elsewhere, we used it as another word for “difficult”, as when we wrote: “Brussels is gearing up for trade talks that could prove more problematic than the tortuous negotiations over the divorce agreement.”

Or we just used it as a fancy way of saying “problem”, as in a comment article about the effect on the economy of a Boris Johnson majority government. We said “the continuing contraction in business investment is especially problematic” when we meant “is a particular problem”.

Academic jargon has a lot to answer for.

Read more

Mea Culpa: Experts in the history of headlines