Battle lines drawn over military jargon

May 28 2008 by Barry Gibson, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

THIS week the Conservatives announced proposals to force feckless youths into work.

The party’s welfare spokesman Chris Grayling wants young people who’ve been without a job for more than three months to go on a compulsory community service programme to improve their employment skills.

And his snappy name for this policy?

Boot camps.

Oh dear. Why are so many things now cloaked in this military jargon?

I can envisage Mr Grayling’s training schemes now.

Lots of bored teenagers sitting around in a classroom while some well-meaning adviser tries to teach them about computer skills and the importance of dressing smartly for a job interview. All well and good, but boot camp it ain’t. The unemployed youths of tomorrow are hardly going to be forced to do push-ups in the mud while a sergeant major yells insults about their mothers.

Calling a compulsory community service programme a boot camp is over the top.

There’s another military metaphor for you – over the top. Our language is littered with them – littered like a minefield.

Politicians and journalists are forever over-hyping things by reaching for warlike terms.

So the Conservatives are not merely doing well at the moment, they’re “on the march”. And Gordon Brown isn’t just in trouble, he’s “in the firing line”.

These terms are little more than empty rhetoric designed to enliven a rather more complex – and dare I say – dull reality.

So I was a little disappointed to read a piece in the Examiner last week reporting a disagreement between Labour, Conservative and Lib Dem councillors.

“Battle lines have been drawn up between the three main political parties on Kirklees Council,” screamed the first line.

Battle lines? Really, as in there’s a load of councillors digging trenches in Greenhead Park?

The reporter who filed this piece – one Barry Gibson – should know better than to employ such a hollow metaphor.

As my news editor joked: “Cliches should be avoided like the plague.”