Mea Culpa: Time for the strange death of a once-evocative cliché

Hackneyed phrases and – how shall we put this? – non-standard spellings in this week’s Independent

It was a peculiar demise indeed (why is someone waving those maracas?)

George Dangerfield has a lot to answer for. He wrote a book in 1935 called The Strange Death of Liberal England, an evocative title that captured a remarkable social and political change. It was about the party’s decline before the Great War, and it was published in the year that Labour sealed its supremacy, when Clement Attlee became the leader of the opposition with 154 seats and the Liberals under Herbert Samuel were reduced to 21.

Ever since, the Strange Death of Blah Blah has become a cliché of first resort for other books (The Strange Death of Tory England, 2005; The Strange Death of Republican America, 2008) and for headline writers.

In an editorial this week, the phrase became so detached from its moorings that we wrote of “the strange death of growth in the productivity of the British economy since the financial crisis”. Puzzling as the stalling of productivity might be, “death of growth” is an awkward construction. It is time for this phrase to go away and die, strangely if necessary.

Horsey metaphor: In an early version of a comment article about the sexual harassment allegations sweeping Westminster, we wrote of “the problem of old men holding the reigns of power”. This is a common confusion between two words that sound alike: rein and reign.

The metaphor of holding the reins of government, or of controlling an organisation, is from being in command of a horse. It often acquires a “g” by association with a monarch’s rule – reign from Latin regnum, kingdom, related to rex, king.

The same thing happens with the phrase “free rein”, which means allowing a horse to run as it will, but which often becomes “free reign”, especially when talking about a powerful person being allowed to behave like an absolute monarch.

Expat hordes: Two other common unconventional spellings were spotted by John Schluter this week. In the World News in Brief in the Daily Edition, we carried a headline, “Cuba announces new ex-pat immigration policies”. People who live outside their own country are known as expatriates, or expats for short. An ex-pat, with a hyphen, suggests someone who used to be called Pat.

Also this week, we wrote in a sports report (cricket, but it could have been many others): “Not even the fervent support of the travelling hoards could lift an England side that lurched from disappointment to disaster.” That has now been changed to “hordes”.

A hoard is a secret stock or store of valuables, from a Germanic word that gave modern German Hort. A horde is an unruly large group of people, originally meaning a tribe or troop of Tartar or other nomads, from Polish horda, itself from Turkish ordu, a (royal) camp.