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Assaults on the language?
Which modern phrases make you flinch? The laterlife team
of writers were highly articulate and indignant when I asked them
this question. ‘Awesome, hopefully, change the world forever, a sea
change, at the end of the day, with hindsight, step change,
blue-skies thinking, fashion-shift’ were all mentioned. My personal
dislike is ‘level playing field’ though I have to confess to a
fondness for ‘bling’.
Why do we – or some of us in later life – flinch at these phrases?
The answers came thick and fast. ‘Too many clichés……simply inane…
cheap and lazy…..PR spin….celeb culture’.
So then I asked about the phrases that we used when we were young.
‘Super, smashing, ghastly, trendy, fabulous, doing their bit,
gear…’ were some of them.
Are there differences between then and now? We had our own
clichés and cheap and lazy inanities too. What is different, we
agreed, is the PR spin and the celeb culture. When politicians talk
about step changes and blue skies thinking they are trying to blind
us with jargon, which we resent. When the words ‘fantastic’ and
‘awesome’ spring out of the mouths of gushing celebs - echoing the
PRs who represent them - we feel irritated at the hyperbole.
Having reached a certain age, we‘ve seen and heard rather a
lot of politicians and PR types trying to pull the wool over our
eyes.
You may have noticed that I have used two clichés in that last
sentence. Our language is rich because we absorb new phrases and new
uses of adjectives into it. Only when a language is dead or dying
are there no new words and phrases.
So, yes, in the end we agreed that change in language is good
and that we were in danger of sounding like old fogeys. But it is
still important to think for oneself and not be seduced by bland
language even if it is proof of it being alive and well (another
cliché).
Are you enraged or exasperated by modern phraseology? Answers to
helen@laterlife.com
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Talkback is a
regular feature in laterlife.com run by
journalist and author Helen Franks. 
