Cliches of our time

TheLastStraw: Forty years after his death, the greatest tribute we can pay Myles na gCopaleen is to say that, thanks to his Catechism of Cliche and its relentless exposure of tired journalism, no self-respecting Irish reporter would ever again commit a hackneyed phrase to print.

Well, all right, that's not completely true. There are a few small journalistic enclaves where the cliche survives: politics, for example. As in Myles's time, exchanges in the Dáil are still invariably described as "heated". Either there are no unheated exchanges, or if there are, they go unreported. But I work in Leinster House a lot and, in the media's defence, I would blame the temperature of the exchanges on inadequate air conditioning, especially in the older parts of the building.

Business is another arena still notorious for repetitive jargon, something I would appeal to financial journalists to address going forward. Then there is sports reporting: a spectrum of human activity so eroded of meaning that, for example, a striker can tuck the ball "home" or he can do the exact opposite and tuck it "away", and it will end up in exactly the same place.

But it's probably in the area of crime (a suburb with a lot of problems, generally) that the most incorrigibly recidivist phrases recur. The Garda-speak of which Myles complained in the 1940s is one of the few things that survived the country's subsequent transformation intact. Some of these phrases have the half-life of uranium. You could encase them in concrete and bury them five miles deep in geologically stable terrain, and they'd still eventually resurface in a Garda press release.

With apologies to Myles, gardaí are always doing one of two things: pursuing a definite line of inquiry, or keeping an open mind. Q: If it's the latter, what are they ruling in or out? A: Nothing. Q: At what stage of the investigation are they ruling nothing in our out? A: This stage.

Q: What did gardaí invariably do with the cocaine? A: They seized it. Q: By what vague-but-authentic-sounding measure was the cocaine deemed to be worth €2 million? A: Its estimated street value.

Q: What are they now doing with a man in his 20s? A: Holding him. Q: Where are they holding him? A: Under Section Four of the Criminal Justice Act. Q: Is that painful? A: No. Q: But is it not inappropriate for a complete stranger to be held in this way? A: He's no stranger - he's well known to the gardaí.

You don't have to be a criminal to be subjected to this sort of thing. Should you be unfortunate enough to be on the wrong end of a row outside a pub, you could find yourself trapped in a nightmarish world of hackneyed phrases from which escape is impossible. Firstly, the row will be upgraded to an "altercation". You won't merely have suffered injuries, you'll have "sustained" them. Then you'll have to go to hospital, where you won't be allowed to enter, like a normal person. You'll be "admitted".

The matron will take over where the gardaí left off, allocating you to one of only four categories that exist for patients in whom the press takes an interest. The following day, you'll read that your condition "was said to be" "comfortable", "stable", "serious", or "critical". I know there are privacy issues here, but I think hospitals could profitably adopt the range of descriptions used for ground conditions at racetracks (good-to-yielding, yielding, yielding-to-soft. . . ), which at least allows for intermediate states.

AS I WAS saying, apart from these isolated cases, Irish journalism is now dominated by the freshly-minted phrase. Of course, this creates its own challenges for the newspaper consumer - a point illustrated by perplexed reader Phil Mortell from Limerick, who has written asking me to "translate" the following passage from a recent review - in this supplement - of Seamus Heaney's new book:

". . . the quick density, the clotted swiftness, of his style increasingly; an intensified telegraphese of notation, catching ever more exactly the actual arabesques of consciousness; fresh proofs of his innate mix of eases and facilities, whereby a rich workaday demotic is fused with the heights of literary sophistication . . . "

Phew. Sorry, Phil. I have no idea what an "actual arabesque of consciousness" is, although I would argue that - to borrow a phrase from American humorist Dave Barry - the Arabesques of Consciousness would be a great name for a rock band. Apart from that, I suspect that the act of fusing a rich workaday demotic with anything may be a crime under Section Four of the Criminal Justice Act.

Accordingly, I have referred your query to the gardaí. They're keeping an open mind at this stage of the investigation.