The return of the ‘staycation’, ‘roadmaps’ and other enemies of clear thinking
The ‘staycation’ is back and that is terrible news. Not the prospect of being able to get around the country again, that’s great. What’s terrible is the reappearance of this festering portmanteau that has been so eagerly adopted, so enthusiastically rammed into any utterance on travel, that its meaning has been mangled beyond repair.
The word ‘staycation’ was coined in the early noughties to describe time taken off work in order to take daytrips, while based at home. Now it seems to mean any holiday in the UK. And, worse still, people have been so keen to riff on it, that via ‘playcation’, ‘gaycation’ and ‘laycation’ it eventually went full, illiterate circle to become ‘awaycation’, which, according to the genius that coined it, means holiday. If only we’d had a serviceable word for that in the first place.
As far back as 1946, George Orwell wrote an essay on Politics and the English Language that is as relevant today as it was then. It should be compulsory reading for anyone who writes anything, ever. In it, he says: ‘As soon as certain topics are raised, the concrete melts into the abstract and no one seems able to think of turns of speech that are not hackneyed: prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house.’
If you are writing on autopilot, your thoughts are driven by those ‘hackneyed’ turns of speech. You will come up with nothing original, and if you don’t fully understand the meaning of what you are communicating, what chance does the reader have?
Aside from ‘staycation’ plenty of other annoying, confusing, thought-addling or plain stupid uses of words or phrases have emerged recently.
How about ‘roadmap’? ‘The roadmap to the end of lockdown’. That is now official terminology and it means nothing. What people are trying to say when they use it in this context is ‘plan’. Originally, the term used was ‘route map’ – it seemed to come into fashion during the 1980’s to describe plans for peace in the Middle East. This made more sense, a route map gets you from one place to another at least, although the word ‘plan’ remains simpler to understand and more precise. As more and more stupid people tried to use the phrase, it changed into ‘roadmap’. A phrase, that in the context of plans, totally meaningless. A roadmap is just a picture of some roads. No starting place, no destination, no PLAN!
Or ‘optics’? Optics is a science broadly based around the behaviour of light. Except it isn’t any more. Now it means, particularly in a political context, how something looks – how something is perceived by the public. This morning, on the Today Programme, that agenda-setting morning news show of record, an interviewee on the subject of the NHS pay rise was asked about ‘the optics of how it looks’. How do you answer that, other than by saying, ‘I’m terribly sorry, but I don’t know what the hell you are talking about’?
Or how about the cod-philosophical, waste-of-space phrase ‘It is what it is.’? Of course it is. Unless it is what it isn’t. Or it isn’t what it is. Which it isn’t. In both cases.
Orwell closed his 1946 essay with six rules:
1. Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.
2. Never use a long word where a short one will do.
3. If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.
4. Never use the passive where you can use the active.
5. Never use a foreign phrase, a scientific word, or a jargon word if you can think of an everyday English equivalent.
6. Break any of these rules sooner than say anything outright barbarous.
Please try to speak and write with precision. I would have said ‘clarity’ – but have you noticed how that word is being used lately?