Shall I tell you a story?

What does "incredible" mean?

1/3/2017

Not that I need to get a life or anything, but I listened to Prime Minister's Questions (rice cooking, radio on, couldn't help it). Not the whole show; just the bit where Theresa May described Jeremy Corbyn's leadership style as "incredible". Her delivery, et cetera, told us that this was a big, clever put-down. In one way, it was: Mr Corbyn had run out of questions, so couldn't reply. But it didn't quite work for me - indeed, it came as a surprise. The word "incredible" tends to be used nowadays to defend embattled, non-manual, typically (but not exclusively) public-sector workers. Nurses, teachers, lecturers, NHS managers, civil-service administrators are all said to work "incredibly" hard to serve the rest of us.
     For a long time now, "incredibly" has been the go-to word to describe good people. They don't work hard; they work "incredibly" hard. The challenges they face are "incredibly" difficult. In the film, The Incredibles are the good guys. They're a Hard-Working Family; at points in the story they're Just About Managing. Words are flexible and they're loosely used, but I don't think 'incredible' has quite the impact Mrs May intended. If it has any impact at all. It's an invisible emphasis-word. Nobody reads in politics; they always read "very carefully". Politicians may give evasive answers, but they've always "made it very clear" at some nebulous point in the past. Oh, and where are the easy choices in politics?
     For me, the masterclass came in the aftermath of the 2013/2014 floods on the Somerset Levels. "Now is not the time for blame," said the then-Prime Minister, standing knee-deep in flooded England. Same line taken by his ministers, and unless I've missed something, we're still waiting for the time for blame to arrive.
     Now is not the time to criticise the PM. No doubt PMQs is incredibly challenging. But have we really got to the point where we're even getting our misuse of language wrong? At the highest level?

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In a desk diary scavenged from a house of the dead, a man records his own experiences of the end times: what he has to do to survive; how he came to be marooned where he is; how he reacts to the discovery that he is not alone.

Over coffee, a young journalist gets The Message.

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