Just Visiting

In the office of the readers' editor, where I'm temporarily installed, I found a book by Clive Whichelow and Hugh Murray called It's Not Rocket Science And Other Irritating Modern Cliches. An accident waiting to happen; don't ask; the jury is out; past its sell-by date - most of them are there, these usages that one loves to hate (though curiously "loves to hate" is not among them). One gazes with awe at some of these formulations, wondering how the drabber among them have come to be so immovably parked in our language. But then it is no less surprising to find a wealth of venerable cliches constantly on the lips of people who can have little conception of the age from which they sprung. "We haven't had to put on our thinking caps yet," I heard a junior minister say on the Today program. Has he ever seen a thinking cap? Did they ever exist? Can any be seen in museums? And why are they still evoked in 2008? Though sometimes a well-worn usage is sensibly updated: "That's the million-dollar question" someone observed last week. In my youth, when the phrase, derived from a US quiz show, first entered the language, the question used to be worth only 64,000 dollars.

Were a man from Mars (another favorite media cliche, surprisingly missed by Whiche low and Murray) to read our papers or tune in to Today, he might well assume that 21st-century Britain was infused with an almost religious reverence for horses and hats. Though few now wear hats, and horses for most of the population have been superseded by motor cars, both are rampant still in the world of media metaphor. If Gordon Brown goes, which ministers will be tossing their hats in the ring? In the media world at least, we still take off our hats to people that we admire, promise to eat them should something astonishing happen, keep things under them when we are reticent and talk through their tops when we're garrulous. "The Conservatives," I heard David Blunkett saying last week, a trace enviously perhaps, could get rid of their leaders "literally at the drop of a hat". We still celebrate hat-tricks in sport, though it must be many decades since a bowler who got rid of three batsmen in three deliveries was rewarded with the gift of a hat.

As for horses, no sooner are hats thrown in rings than horses appear: dark horses sometimes, or stalking horses, their intentions made known by those who claim to have got their information straight from the horse's mouth. We accuse people who do things we do not like of driving coaches and horses through some institution or other. We climb on high ones when we are pompous; we flog dead ones if we fail (see below) to read the writing on the wall. We hold them while we pause to consider; but if we consider too long, we find ourselves locking the stable door after they've bolted. Why don't we instead now talk of locking the garage door when the Lamborghini is halfway to Gloucestershire, or the Ford Ka's been stranded for 45 minutes in Hammersmith Broadway?

Some of these ancient usages do get pensioned off: we no longer, thank goodness, pile Pelion on Ossa, or when in Rome, do as Rome does, while "safe as houses" is no longer as safe a usage as it was before Northern Rock. In a book about a mining village in Yorkshire I found a union leader warning potential black legs not to be Ishmaels, a term I doubt you'd hear in what's left of that industry now.

There are some in this hoary congregation which (and here I avoid any mention of sell-by dates) are overdue for recycling. Yet the best have survived because they describe conditions which no modern parallel evokes quite as well. Who can come up with a generally acceptable 21st-century substitute for the sword of Damocles, the bed of Procrustes, crossing the Rubicon - all expressions whose origins many who use them would find it hard to explain. The writing appeared on the wall in the time of Belshazzar, some 26 centuries back. It conveys, in a mere five words, a moment of dread and menace which even in an age pregnant with dread and menace we have yet to capture more vividly.