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.
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| 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.
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| 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!
[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).
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