When, exactly, did we become such a nation of cissies, scaredy-cats and milksops? Consider the following recent headlines: “Students to be hit with another ‘eye-watering’ interest rate rise on tuition fee repayments”; “Labour reveals eye-watering pay hike for fatcat bosses of water firms”; “Aberdeen council spin doctor given ‘eye-watering’ £63,000 pay-off”; “To throw Away Unopened review: Viv Albertine’s eye-watering honesty”.
At least some of these had the decency to put eye-watering in quotation marks, but even so, the sense of alarm and outrage is bordering on the hysterical. Its usage is also becoming annoyingly ubiquitous and I call on my fellow headline writers to desist forthwith.
While I’m on the subject of headlines, there has been an equally unwelcome new visitor of late, as the following recent examples make all too plain: “San Leon energy shares resume trading after exiting reverse takeover talks”; “Can Emmanuel Macron keep Trump from exiting the Iran nuclear deal?”; “Are Samsung exiting the business communications market?” and “How Affleck exiting the Batman director’s chair led to the Deathstroke movie”. What is wrong with the word “leaving”? Do people somehow imagine that exiting is more dynamic or is it yet another baleful byproduct of Brexit? Well, consider that David Davis has been saddled with the quite revolting title of secretary of state for exiting the European Union and you’ll get my drift.
Having got these recent annoyances off my chest, I’d like to return to an age-old grievance, namely using nouns as verbs and perhaps the most egregious one yet.
A colleague was watching Bloomberg News when the announcer proclaimed that Facebook had been “townhalling”. No, he didn’t have a clue what it meant either. But if his disgust had reached eye-watering proportions I wouldn’t be at all surprised.
