Well-worn phrases

There are shoes you wear every day that become comfortable through familiarity, so much so that you never take them off, you no longer think about them, they're just what you walk through the world in. 

Donovan wrote a song about this back in the 1960s.

But eventually they start to annoy you as the soles crack and holes appear. The day comes to throw them out. And so it is with language — the vocabulary, the phraseology that belongs to the present moment. Eventually it's had its day. Time to move on.

At the present time there are phrases worn like garments, vocabulary fashion crazes adopted for effect.

Tedious beyond belief. Time to throw them out.

Top of the list for me at the moment is that phrase beloved of every politician —

Let me be absolutely clear.

"Let me be absolutely clear" Ha. 🤣  Clear, all right. We can see straight through you. It is so very transparent that we can see you are lying and manipulating us.

It is worn like a lanyard by everyone you should not trust, and just now it seems no political pronouncement is complete without it.

Next on my list — always sets my teeth on edge — is the sarcastic resort of every TV contestant (on Bake-Off, the Sewing Bee, anything like that) —

No pressure!

I am so weary of it that it passes through my head like a convulsion, every single time it resurfaces. Happily, it is slowly beginning to fade, as everyone else gets tired of it too.

After that, I am well weary of hearing (in that curiously robotic voice redolent with the self-righteousness that we know so well) the phrase —

Far-right thugs.

Oh, yes, "Far-right thugs." We know who they are, don't we? Ordinary people. Probably you. Anyone who has the temerity to mind when a lad is stabbed to death or a little girl brutally violated. 

Hot on its heels there usually follows, like the trailing scarves of Isadora Duncan (Did you know that's how she died? One strangled her) another fashion accessory — "Full force of the law". Worn to remind you that you are not safe, that someone who is not you has power over you, that you'd better be quiet, better comply, better be afraid, because someone in a suit or a uniform will ruin your life if you don't kow-tow.

Ah, these phrases; they take me back to the good old days when no Evangelical prayer time was complete without the curious phrase —

Just really

— as in "We just really want to praise you, Lord."

Type it into the YouTube search box.

Look:

Somewhere in heaven an angel murmurs "Seriously?"

"Just really" wasn't honesty, it was a badge, a tribal cry, the signal of a particular religious in-crowd.

Sometimes, of course, you may come across a well-worn phrase that is the sole property of a particular person, because no one else wants it. My prayer partner Margery treasured one such example, an elderly friend from her own younger days, who was fond of saying —

Nobody wants to see my old face.

And oddly enough, Margery said, she was right — they did not.

Margery herself had two well-worn axioms, but they came in verse form. They were still at the comfortable stage and hadn't yet begun to irritate. They were abidingly useful, and return to my mind from time to time.

The first was —

Here lies the body of Jonathan Grey

Who died defending his right of way.

He was right — dead right — as he strode along;

Just as dead as if he'd been wrong.

And the second, a caution from Ogden Nash for those of us who wear trousers; and it is sadly true —

Sure, deck your lower limbs in pants;

Yours are the limbs, my sweeting.

You look divine as you advance —

Have you seen yourself retreating?

(Reading it requires you to adopt an American accent, obviously, to make it rhyme properly and sound as it should).

He was right of course, no doubt about it. But there's a new phrase on the block, adopted and utilised on every possible occasion by the British politician Rupert Lowe. I rather like it, and it applies well to the trouser scenario —

I don't care.