Words: Paradigm

VOGUE words of one sort or another have always been with us and it's silly to get upset about them; indeed, they can be fun. So why am I so irritated by paradigm, which is going particularly strong at the moment? I think it must be because it sounds important but isn't. It comes from the Greek and means a pattern, model or example, no more. There is nothing exciting or poetic about it, though one can imagine one of the metaphysicals, perhaps Andrew Marvell, using it: 'Our love, like nature's Paradigm, / Runs from th' absurd to the sublime' with a capital P to show he was pleased with it. It is not, unlike vogue words such as symbiosis and interface, a borrowing from science; the linguisticians, and later the philosophers, took it up when it was already a general word.

Now the sportsmen, the critics, even the leader writers, seem unable to do without it. 'If the South African paradigm were adopted,' declared the Times last week, 'Mr Arafat should be able to contain Hamas', when it could less pretentiously have said something like 'South Africa has shown what can be done' etc. A piece in the Observer says of a band at the Glastonbury Festival: 'Well-dressed paradigms of northern insouciance, they whine and strum and jangle and stare at the audience boldly, like they're the ones who are here to be entertained.'

Paradigm looks overdressed in this company. But already the word has drifted into imprecision. From having first meant a pattern or exemplar to be followed, it has long come to mean also an instance of an already existing pattern. The Scotsman recently called Stella Rimington 'your absolutely paradigmatic civil servant'; it meant 'typical'. Meanwhile John Witherow, acting editor of the Sunday Times, writes to the Independent about 'the increasingly threatened paradigm that there is only one cause of Aids'. What on earth is paradigm doing here, one wonders? I suppose he felt he ought to get it in somewhere. But do let's give it a break.