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JulesRants
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Putting the cliches on the line
"Our soldiers are putting their lives on the line..."
"...in insisting on education reform, Blair is putting his career on the line..."
"...I put my ass on the line for you and now you treat me like..."
Lazy fucking hacks. What's happened to the writers of all kinds
(journalists, authors, script & screen writers, etc) who have
decided en masse to cling to this hackneyed phrase like limpets?
Why don't we ever hear about anyone putting anything at risk, in jeopardy, in danger, in harm's way and a whole host of other things that mean the same thing as the hateful metaphor "on the line"?
What conference did I miss where the decision was taken to consign
literary expression and conversational variety to one side in favour of
the rhetorical equivalent of vanilla (nice enough that everyone will
like it, but nobody would want to never taste anything else again)?
At first, it was just a few US military talking heads, then it started
creeping into Hollywood, then suddenly every English-speaking
politician, soldier, commentator, and everyone else in the public eye
cannot but say something or another that might be at risk is on the
sodding line.
Phoooey!
Oh, and Happy New Year
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3.1.06 18:49
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School
And another word-related niggle - when did school attendees stop being called "pupils" and start being called "students"?
Outside America, now - I'm talking British English here...
What brought this to a head was a document I read when I went home to
see my parents at Chrimble. An primary school contemporary of mine had
written a social history of our home village, based primarily on the
1861 Census. He described in detail the route taken by the census
taker, which families lived where, and so on.
The interesting thing, in this context, was that pre-teens were usually
described as "scholars" under occupation - meaning they were "at
school" or "being schooled".
It seems to me that some (but only some) of the problems we have with
unruly school kids these days comes from terminology. I've mused in the
past (elsewhere) that the old ideas of master and pupil,
while somewhat archaic, had a sense of pecking order that is not
present in teacher and student.
To my mind, the word "student" places too
much emphasis on how much of the work in schools is actively carried
out by the children/youths (below A-level, nobody really studies
the way one does at university, where the lecturers and tutors often
merely guide one towards which books to read). At the same time, it
somehow diminishes the role of the teachers; while it isn't a zero sum
game, teachers do rather more of the impartation of knowledge than
(most) kids do in the active acquisition of it.
Going back to the days of "master & pupil" might not ring true,
but, in coming across my old schoolie's mention of the word "scholar"
in it's purest sense, I thought maybe the educational establishment
could bring it back into current use.
Not that any of them will ever read this, of course...
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4.1.06 02:24
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JulesRants
