The fortunate among you will not be familiar with Mr Joey Barton, an English football club manager. He provoked controversy this week, which isn’t a new experience in a chequered career.
This time, however, he was being criticised for his use of language.
Joey was bemoaning the inconsistent play of his Bristol Rovers team. He said: “Someone gets in for a game, does well but then has a holocaust, a nightmare, an absolute disaster.”
It was his use of “holocaust” which was seized upon. He drew a comparison between a footballer having a bad game and one of the greatest crimes of human history. Clearly, this is not appropriate.
I have no intention of defending Mr Barton. Indeed I add myself to his list of detractors. But on this occasion I do not believe he meant to offend. Nor do I believe he really thinks an off-form footballer is “an absolute disaster”. And if this was his definition of “a nightmare” then I’m afraid many of us harbour worse fears than a badly-kicked football.
What Mr Barton did was reach for the most extreme words in his vocabulary. It is exaggeration, a common language fault.
A young lady tripping over her high heels in front of her peers is not “utterly devastated”. She will have been mildly embarrassed. A poorly-executed best man’s speech is not “an apocalypse”. It is perhaps a little dull.
When I worked on the news desk we were contacted by a woman whose horse’s name had been wrongly spelled in the paper. She demanded a retraction to correct what she described as “the ultimate humiliation”.
The cause of these lapses into hyperbole is often that people (like Mr Barton) think extreme words lend power to their argument. I believe the opposite. People using shrill, disproportionate language appear to me to have lost perspective. I would hesitate to trust their judgment.
Worse, I think a significant minority do not possess vocabularies wide enough to properly express themselves. They employ the only words they know, whether the usage is fitting or not.
Their lack of ammunition is caused by a failure to challenge themselves by reading erudite, horizons-broadening literature.
Too few people nowadays enthuse over words, or enjoy them for their own sake, or collect them to enrich their speech. Our society is poorer for this. It’s an absolute disaster!
Word of the week
Ruth (noun)
A feeling of pity, distress, or grief. EG: “Only the hardest heart wouldn’t feel some ruth for a horse traumatised by the incorrect spelling of its name.”
Read the latest Oh my word! every Saturday in The Courier. Contact me at sfinan@dctmedia.co.uk
