In the week that Theresa May said she would be launching a review into whether state intervention was needed to preserve national and local newspapers – more than 200 local papers have closed since 2005 – it is not the parlous state of the regional press that I wish to address, but the use of the word “local” or, rather, the overuse.
Should you have been glued to Village of the Year on Channel 4, (you mean you haven’t?) you will have been deluged with local communities, local amenities, local shops and, most egregious of all, local residents. What, you mean the people who live there haven’t been bussed in from Mongolia? In all cases, the word is quite redundant.
But I suppose that when we live in an era when TV chefs talk of frying off, reducing down and boiling off, I shouldn’t be surprised any more by such redundancies than I am by the greatest horror of them all – parking up.
Talking of horrors, I am indebted to a well-known Fleet Street defence expert for last week introducing into the lexicon “the oligarch community” and to a business correspondent, reporting on Lloyds’ decision to cut more than 900 jobs, who reassured the world that “no customer-facing roles in branches” will be affected. In the good old days, I expect that they were known as tellers.
I’m also equally indebted to another economics correspondent for: “Rightly, in some fields, they insist that the playing field has been stacked against them.” Yup, we all know what he means, but now I’m very worried about those goalposts. Have they crossed a line in the sand?
