Stumped by curve balls
Writing in The Guardian , Duncan Campbell laments the state of the English cliche
Andrew Miller
25-Feb-2013
Writing in The Guardian, Duncan Campbell laments the state of the English cliche. Why, oh why, must everyone in public life "step up to the plate" when the vast majority have never been near a baseball game. What's wrong with "going into bat" instead?
George Orwell warned us about all this more than 60 years ago. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, he wrote about the dangers of "a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves". He suggested that "many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning ... a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying".
Andrew Miller is the former UK editor of ESPNcricinfo and now editor of The Cricketer magazine