Words That Make Me Go "Aaaargh!"

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me. But there are words that offend me, or rather they irritate and annoy, infuriate and exasperate. There are some words and phrases that make me want to yell “aaargh!” whenever I hear or read them. These are some of them.

“Not the result we wanted. We go again.”

This one pops up frequently on Twitter, invariably posted by a footballer, to express their disappointment at a particular result. Usually it appears after a defeat, but sometimes it comes after a drawn game the tweeter expected to win. Since the object of most sports is to win, “Not the result we wanted” is clearly a truism. “We go again,” says no more than they will try and win the next game. We can therefore boil this down to “We lost today, but we’ll try and win the next game,” which in the immortal words of Basil Fawlty, is “stating the bleedin’ obvious.”

“Time to draw a line under it and move on.”

We’ve been hearing this a lot recently, what with the daily dose of Tory misdeeds sometimes involving more than one scandal of some description or another. In the aftermath of Wallpapergate and Partygate, and after the PPE procurement shenanigans and the eye-watering cost of the Test and Trace app, we are all implored to draw a line under events that embarrass politicians and the government and move on.

Tony Blair, attempting to draw a line under the WMD fiasco.

In fairness to the current government, this is nothing new: I’m pretty sure we heard similar after the Iraq war/Weapons of Mass Destruction debacle, for example. Time to move on has been wheeled out by politicians of all persuasions, seemingly since time immemorial and means, “Please, for the love of God, stop talking about this, I know I’m bang to rights but I’m not going to resign or apologise.” The regularity of the expression’s use is as tedious as it is objectionable, the belief of the entitled that their transgressions are too trivial to be pursued.

“Partygate”

Not Partygate itself, although goodness knows that is outstandingly bad enough, but the suffix “-gate” when added to some sort of scandal, outrage, or misdeed. Since the original Watergate affair, named for the Watergate Office Building in which the Democratic National Committee’s offices were burgled, there have been just shy of 300 '-gate' scandals or controversies, according to Wikipedia, and probably countless more that haven't been widely publicised. It is without doubt, time to draw a line under the expression, stop using it, and move on.

If we don’t stop, we might find that were Andrew Marr involved in some scandal, we’d have to call it Marrgate. If there were some outrage in the Kent seaside town of similar name, that would be Margategate. If Kew Gardens were embroiled in controversy, we’d have to call it Gardengate. And, if there was a further scandal centred around the Watergate Building, would we have to call it Watergategate?[1] Thankfully, when Bill Gates and his wife Melinda announced their intention to divorce, there was no Gatesgate, although inevitably that did get wheeled out to describe the story that some Americans thought that Gates wanted to use the coronavirus vaccine to microchip them.

Adding “-gate” to the controversy over incidents like the cost of decorating the flat in Downing Street (Wallpapergate), or Keir Starmer’s beer and curry in Durham (variously Currygate or Beergate), the parties in Downing Street (Partygate), and Boris Johnson diving into a fridge to avoid a reporter (Fridgegate), is lazy, trite, hackneyed, and so outmoded that it really needs to stop.

I imagine that many hacks who use’-gate’ are too young to remember Watergate, and genuinely think it is normal English usage – and perhaps now, it is (sadly).

“Let me be perfectly clear about this/We’ve always been perfectly clear about this.”

As soon as someone says “Let me be perfectly clear about this,” then you can be fairly sure that what follows will be opaque at best, will contain much obfuscation, and may be a downright lie. In the same way, “We’ve always been perfectly clear about this” will lead to a statement that claims to be in complete accord with previous pronouncements on the subject, but which totally contradicts them. In certain circumstances this leads to someone denying ever saying something even after being shown video evidence of them saying it, as you can see from the video embedded in this article on The Guardian website: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/dec/23/us-ambassador-netherlands-apologises-fake-news-interview-muslim-no-go-zones)

The counter intuitive stuff

I’m not talking about any particular phrase or expression here, but rather the explanation that defies logic, the statement that bends facts into something so breath-takingly egregious that you have to pinch yourself to be sure you actually heard what you thought you heard.

It has been reported in the media in recent days that there are fears there could be power cuts this winter. A "reasonable" worst-case scenario predicts major gas shortages in winter if Russia cuts off more supplies to the EU, which could lead to power cuts for up to six million households. It’s easy to imagine a government spokesman spinning this as a positive rather than a negative, explaining that power cuts will help those on low incomes to budget their fuel bills more efficiently by reducing their energy consumption by as much as 180 hours per month, resulting in considerable savings.

In much the same way, in the event that there were food shortages and rationing had to be introduced (unlikely, I hope), then I have no doubt that, in answer to TV interviewers saying that this was a terrible state of affairs, some minister would proclaim that on the contrary, the British people were grateful for this opportunity to better balance their diets, to eat more healthily, and to have the strain on their budgets eased by being given the opportunity to buy less food.

Like Humpty Dumpty, when politicians use a word it means what they want it to mean, not what we mere mortals usually expect it to mean. Last week Chancellor Rishi Sunak said, with a completely straight face, that his ‘temporary, targeted, levy’ on the energy companies was not a windfall tax, but  actually a tax on windfall profits. Interviewer Chris Mason’s incredulity when Sunak said this was palpable.

Rishi Sunak - It's a tax on windfalls, not a windfall tax!

So inured have we become to alternative facts, fake news, and barefaced lies, that the Prime Minister lying to Parliament, or a government minister spouting falsehoods in TV interviews has become so completely unremarkable we don’t even notice most of the time, and nor do many interviewers, who seem content to allow such nonsense to be spouted, unchallenged.

For that reason, I believe that the time has come to have teams of full-time, real-time fact checkers in the House of Commons, and present in radio and TV studios, who could sound a QI style klaxon every time a falsehood is uttered. It would make PMQs very entertaining indeed!

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[1] If I thought that my idea here was original, but a quick Google search shows that David Mitchell and Robert Webb got there first (and funnier).