‘Rhetorical inflation’ is rampant

I’m back with news cliches that readers emailed to me.

One reader said newscasts too often say they have breaking news. I have to agree. Merriam-Webster calls it “late-breaking news” and defines it as the most recent news of the day.

Sometimes an event will happen at 10 a.m. and is still called breaking news at 3 p.m. I have MSNBC in the background much of the day. The channel has a string of tones indicating some breaking news, and my Pavlovian response to the tones is to turn my head to the screen. I have been well-trained. I think news stations know that we react to breaking news.

One reader wrote about existential threat. I hadn’t thought about that phrase before, but it was amusing to see how many people are annoyed by it.

Dictionary.com describes it this way: “An existential threat is a threat to something’s very existence — when the continued being of something is at stake or in danger. It is used to describe threats to actual living things as well to nonliving things, such as a country or an ideology.”

That’s pretty bad. You clearly want to avoid existential threats. But a few writers over the years noted that the phrase is being used far too often.

In May 2019, one pundit said of the term existential threat:

“Trite. Hyperbolic. Alarmist. These are the words that come most readily to mind every time I hear another policy pontificator characterize something as an ‘existential threat.’”

In February 2019, another person wrote:

“America’s addiction to hyperbolic rhetoric is an existential threat to the United States. Actually, it isn’t. But putting it that way sure got your attention, didn’t it?

“And that, dear reader, is a big part of the problem. We live during a time of extreme rhetorical inflation.”

A 2015 article with the headline “Existential threat: the birth of a cliche” started like this:

“In the endless game of word association that governs vocabulary, the current favorite as a partner of existential is threat. They make an odd couple.”

And one more, from June 2019: “Political discourse has taken on a certain shade of Camus. The term existential threat is fertile of late, especially among Democratic presidential hopefuls.”

Maybe the people tempted to use existential threat to describe a situation should first consider using threat or its many synonyms: danger, hazard, menace, peril, risk, trouble.

Epicenter is another word being used often. I wrote about this many months ago, so I’ll just quote myself: The center of something is the hub, the heart, the core of something. Geologists use epicenter to describe the point on the Earth’s surface above where an earthquake happens. So the epicenter is not the core or hub of the action.

Here is it in The Washington Post:

“In April, the New York City region was the epicenter of the crisis, with hundreds dying each day in the city but new cases being detected in all of the surrounding counties.”

News people also often misuse the phrase begging the question when they really mean raising the question.

I wrote about this in 2019, though I used too many words that time to repeat here. You can read the 2019 column at arkansasonline. com/28beg.

And readers sent in a few more lines that we all could do without.

It’s not rocket science. (Well, that’s condescending.)

Think outside the box. (That’s both condescending and annoyingly trendy.)

At this point in time … (Please just say now.)

And, some readers commented on sports news cliches, which can be perfectly awful. I read in a book a few years back — I can’t remem

ber which one — that when sports were on the radio, the announcers spent their time describing the action on the field or the court. Once TV came along, announcers were left with finding often-inane things to talk about because viewers could see all the action.

One reader commented on silly basketball phrases. An announcer might call the ball the rock. Why? It’s the same number of letters as ball, so you’re really not saving time. And when the player makes the basket, the announcer might say he drained it. Again, why?

I found quite a few sports cliches online, not surprisingly.

Here are a few of the bad ones (with my occasional snark in parentheses).

Now he’s got to step up. (Sure, if he wants to stay on the team.)

They’ve got great team chemistry. They have to come together as a team. (Oops, did they fail chemistry?) They came to play. (If not, they might get in trouble.)

We can’t say enough about him. (We don’t have all day.)

That was a rookie mistake. (Is he a rookie? Then it might be OK.)

They wanted it more. (Are you sure?)

He gave 110%. (That is simply not possible!)

We’re gonna take it one game at a time. (Taking it two games at a time would, admittedly, be difficult.)

Then, there’s the weather. One reader said he had had it with meteorologists who merely say, “Rain is possible.”

Any dolt on the street can say that rain is possible. The professionals should try to predict how possible rain is.

And why are they called meteorologists, anyway? Do they study meteors? No, Merriam-Webster says meteorology is a science that deals with the atmosphere and its phenomena and especially with weather and weather forecasting.

They’re also weather forecasters. Forecasting is the job.