It was the Greek historian Plutarch who long ago wrote that we judge famous people not by their great deeds but more often by some small incident or chance remark. Thus in the case of Hillary Clinton, now making her way slowly towards the White House, I am constantly reminded of an occasion in 2008 where she gave a vivid description of her visit to war-torn Bosnia, and how it was so dangerous that she had to run from the aeroplane to avoid a hail of bullets.
Unfortunately for Hillary there was contemporary television footage which showed her wreathed in smiles descending from the plane and being greeted by cheering Bosnians carrying garlands of flowers. But it wasn’t so much the film that struck me at the time as Clinton’s response to it. She told the press: “I think that, a minor blip, you know, if I said something like that, you know, I say a lot of things – millions of words a day – so if I misspoke it was just a misstatement.” Politicians have been emphasising how important it is for those seeking asylum in Britain to be able to speak our language. They ignore the fact that it is hard sometimes even for the natives to keep up with all the changes in the meanings of words and the new words that are being introduced on an almost daily basis.
For Hillary, and probably many other politicians, “misspeak” and “misstatement” are useful new words that can replace the word “lie” when used either as a verb or a noun. There is another of these “mis-” words which will have found its way into the dictionary by now. The word is “misselling”, and it is used most frequently to describe the actions of various banks who have charged their customers for unasked-for insurance policies of little or no value.
Just as misspeak means “lie”, misselling means “fraud”. But we are not allowed to call it that, and the public is left with the impression that misselling was not deliberate – just another little blip, as Hillary would call it.
One of the functions of a journalist nowadays ought to be to alert his or her readers to the use of words, in particular those used by politicians.
Unfortunately we have become so used to the clichés of today’s journalism that we no longer query or even recognise them for what they are. Does anyone object when public figures talk about “working mothers”, with its implication that mothers who stay at home to look after their children are not working, when, in fact they are working much harder and longer hours than women sitting in an office staring at a computer screen?
My least favourite cliché, now in universal use, is “loved ones” as a synonym for relatives, when we know perfectly well that by no means all our relatives are loved, however much we may try. And as with misspeaking, morality comes into this with the popularity of the word “inappropriate” to describe bad behaviour of any kind. No wonder the Church is considered irrelevant and outdated when it continues to describe such behaviour as ‘‘sinful’’, or insists that marriage means the union of a man and a woman.
Richard Ingrams is a former editor of Private Eye and The Oldie
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