Mea Culpa: the gold standard of grammar and style

Clichés from political history in this week’s Independent, plus some fossilised words and phrases that could easily be brought to life

Winston Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer, in 1929: John Parrot/Stocktrek Images/Getty (John Parrot/Stocktrek Images/Getty)

We reported on Wednesday that five countries had said “they would be joining the UK in setting up fully public registers of company owners – a measure considered to be the ‘gold standard’ for exposing tax avoiders”.

For a long time the use of “gold standard” was restricted by the Metaphoric Curiosities Act 1976 to the description of A-levels in the pantheon of education qualifications.

The trouble is that the actual gold standard, the policy of allowing the holders of paper money to convert notes into bullion, was a disaster. Winston Churchill as Chancellor of the Exchequer (pictured above) restored the policy in 1925: it deflated the economy and it made the Depression worse after 1929. Just as it is worth remembering that the Midas touch was a curse, it is worth bearing in mind that the gold standard was an attempt to recapture past economic glories that went horribly wrong.

Wilsonism: We were doing so well in a turbulent period in politics, only to fall at a late stage on our sports pages. The ban on the use of “a week is a long time in politics” held until Wednesday, when an interview with Molly Renshaw, the swimmer selected for the GB team at the Rio Olympics, opened thus: “They say a week is a long time in politics – which couldn’t be more true in this post-Brexit period of hell – but it’s also a long time when you’re waiting to find out if you have fulfilled an ambition that’s been driving you on for four years.”

What is surprising about what has been a cliché for four decades is that there is no record of Harold Wilson ever saying it. It seems to have been attributed to him by Westminster journalists in around 1964, but no one put it in quotation marks at the time.

Fossil words: The same article also observed that British swimmers had done well at the Beijing Olympics in 2008, but not so well four years later: “After the splash Adlington and co made in Beijing they were a bit of a damp squib at London 2012, the golden light shining more on the athletes.”

This was a rather literal use of a fossil phrase. A squib is a firework and if it were in a swimming pool it wouldn’t be damp but submerged, with no prospect of going off at all, let alone of shedding golden light on anything.

I look forward to seeing all these fossil words being brought back into use, provided that they are detached from their familiar partners: squib, figment, swingeing, unsung, amok, fledged, inclement and dulcet.

Everyday problem: The other day I mentioned my plan to write a simple line of computer code to cut the “tili” from every use of “utilise” on The Independent. Another straightforward substitution would be to detect every use of “on a daily basis” and replace it with “every day”.

Most recently, on Wednesday, a contributor wrote: “Nicky Morgan and the Government seem to be blind to most of what children achieve on a daily basis.”

If only I could write computer code.