They come in waves, unstoppable forces sweeping across journalism and the media. Quite often you don’t notice them, perhaps not even until you’re saying one of them glibly to a friend. They’re the fashionable news sayings and idioms, like ‘the elephant in the room’, or ‘the perfect storm’. Both idioms are legitimate sayings of longstanding provenance (‘elephant in the room’ dates back at least to 1959, and ‘the perfect storm’ to 1936), which at times in recent years have trampled or engulfed all areas of news reportage, seemingly paralysing those involved with spasms of unimaginative copycat dependence. ‘The perfect storm’ even topped a widely-publicised list of over-used words in 2007.

The ‘elephant in the room’ phenomenon was, I’m convinced, spurred by the constant reference to it in the ‘E’ series of QI, which was first broadcast in the autumn of 2007 and has been endlessly repeated since. ‘The perfect storm’ vogue fitted well with the gloomy turbulence of the credit crunch, but was pounced upon by the media to describe any event or outcome that was a consequence of sometimes as little as three contributing factors. Since this idiom can be used to encapsulate a large proportion of the things that go on in this world, however mundane they might be, for a while it seemed to be everywhere. This morning, I hadn’t washed for over a day, I’d got sweaty running for a bus last night and my girlfriend told me I was beginning to smell. Thus, the perfect storm was created for my taking a shower. The elephant in the room was that I’d forgotten to buy any deodorant the last time I went shopping.

These sayings come and go perhaps because they’re seen as providing news items with more awareness and currency, which adds to their legitimacy as au courant sources of information. If you can catch them early, their prevalence can be most amusing to note. Which idioms and sayings have you noticed doing the rounds at the moment?

Read about other idioms,  sayings and words in the news.

Why is it that journalists seem to think that they are allowed the greatest licence when using the English language? Why do they not feel bound by the same linguistic restraints as the rest of us? Often they make up brand new words to describe something in a way they feel that no existing word can. Recently, on BBC Radio 4 News, I heard a three-pronged problem facing the prime minister referred to as a ‘trilemma’.

At times they slough off the bonds of redundancy in language. Yesterday morning I heard another journo refer to an issue that was on all of our collective consciences. I’m sure this was meant to be on our collective conscience. Perhaps he was being paid by the word. They’ve even freed themselves from the chains of understanding parts of speech. During a recent report, a journalist claimed “This terrible, wide-spread crisis – whatever synonym you want to use to describe it”. Surely she meant to say adjective as terrible and wide-spread certainly aren’t synonyms.

The credit crunch seems to have given rise to even more sloppy language. Just today I listened to a commentary on the financial report issued by Marks & Spencer. The journalist said that it was “a lot less bad than was expected under the circumstances.”

There also appears to be a resurgence of the (mis)use of two comparatives. A lot has a connotation of value or amount whereas less has the opposite meaning. I can’t find an exact term for this other than to describe it as a paradoxical phrase. Although, in grammar, comparative forms of words can be ‘terms’ or ‘phrases’. So it’s perhaps more accurate to identify it as the misuse of ‘two comparative forms’.

Time Magazine Online has a headline that reads “Is the Economy Starting to Recover? Or Just Less Bad?”. The only thing ‘less bad’ is that they managed not to put a lot in front of it.