An Irishman's Diary

LIKE eagle-eyed reader John O’Hagan, I at first welcomed the news – as reported in our Page 2 digest on Wednesday – that “an English BMW dealer has banned foreign sales of used cars which will hit Irish buyers”.

The wonder of this, it seemed to me, was why BMW would produce cars that it was known would hit people, Irish or otherwise, in the first place. And why buyers, in particular? Not that any sane BMW driver would want the car to hit anybody else. But surely the act of buying it should confer some sort of privileges.

On the other hand, the reference was to “used cars”. Which could imply that, somewhere in England and unknown to BMW, the vehicles were being modified to hit Irish buyers, perhaps as some kind of sick practical joke.

This immediately suggested the involvement of Jeremy Clarkson and his fellow middle-aged scamps on Top Gear, who are always trying to think up new motoring stunts to amuse viewers and who have been accused of using racist humour before.

But after allowing my confusion about the digest item to last long enough that I could get half a column out of it, I eventually turned to the actual story in the Motors section to read more about this car-dealing English philanthropist who had intervened to save us.

And imagine my disappointment when he turned out to be the villain of the piece. For alas, it appeared that the report had lost something during the digestion process.

A meaning closer to what was intended might have been achieved by using a comma after “cars”, followed by the words “a move that” instead of “which”. This would have eliminated any implied physical threat to Irish car buyers, while allowing us to retain the word “hit”: which is a great favourite of journalists, especially the ones who write headlines.

YOU CAN SEEthe verb's attraction. It's dynamic. It packs a punch, sometimes literally. And above all, it's short, fitting into even very confined spaces. Indeed, there are similar reasons behind the popularity of another three-letter word you regularly see in headlines: "set". As in: "Election set for February" or "Government set for defeat".

“Set” is one of those terms that has become almost a badge of our profession, like an NUJ card. So much so that one now regularly sees and hears it in places where, defeating the whole purpose, it’s superfluous. Many radio reporters seem to be addicted to writing headlines like “Taoiseach set to resign”, even though the S-word could be dropped there with no effect on meaning.

Back in January, I recall reading a headline somewhere that said: “Ireland set to be hit by snow again”. The word was similarly redundant in that case – unless the reference was to a group of people known as the “Ireland set”. And barring the possibility that these were tax exiles living in the Swiss Alps, it was hard to think of a scenario in which snow would affect them uniquely.

Of course I speak as a member of another set – the Dublin cycling one – which was all too frequently hit by snow during the big freeze. It usually arrived in small, compressed lumps thrown by gurriers. But it could have been worse. So long as used English BMWs and other larger projectiles left me alone, I wasn’t complaining.

PRONEas it may be to misunderstanding, the word "hit" is not (yet, at least) in the same category as "inflammable", a term that had to be downgraded in the interests of public safety.

In fact, as one of my favourite reference books – Fritz Spiegl's Contradictionary: an A-Z of confusibles, lookalikes, and soundalikes– suggests, this may be "the only instance of an official change in meaning and usage demanded by a British government body".

Inflammable means, and has always meant, “easily set on fire”. But the problem, historically, was that many people thought (or were thought to think by officials paid to worry about them) that it meant the opposite. And it’s true that, if you were to make the mistake of assuming English to be in any way logical, “inflammable” would seem to bear the same relation to “flammable” as “insane” does to “sane”.

Unfortunately there was no such word as "flammable" until it was deemed necessary to invent it. Now you see it on everything from nightdresses to oil-tanks. And the usage has spread far beyond British English. Even that fusty old American language classic, Strunk & White's The Elements of Style,acknowledges the new word's role in "saving lives", before sniffily advising that this is no excuse for writers to use it.

Their ruling on the matter concludes: "For [safety reasons], trucks carrying gasoline or explosives are now marked FLAMMABLE. Unless you are operating such a truck and hence are concerned with the safety of children and illiterates, use inflammable." I suppose the same advice applies in Ireland, for both trucks and literature, with one possible addendum. If it's a used truck, especially one imported from England, drivers and writers alike are urged to exercise maximum caution around it at all times.