A Matter of Factors

I've often written that it is safer not to use 'long' or 'exotic' words unless you're really sure what they mean. Here's an example of a phrase that is neither long nor exotic, but still easily misused because the original context is overlooked.

The 'feel-good factor'. This term is a clever, fairly recent invention, intended to suggest an element in one's experience (such perhaps as sunny weather, good company, being flattered, or pride in one's nationality) that makes one feel good. A factor is by definition an element that affects an outcome. As a mathematical concept, it is a number that by multiplying or dividing (or being added or subtracted or whatever), changes the arithmetical outcome. By extension, it can be something else that affects an outcome (eg the weather, or someone's skill, or a windfall, or an accident, or sheer luck - good or bad).

So to write (as a contributor to a periodical recently did) "You won't get the buzz of applause . . . but you'll get a nice feel-good factor" shows that the author has misunderstood the term.. What he meant was just "you'll feel good". What originated as a piece of imaginative word-play (I wonder who coined the happy phrase ?) has now become a cliché. But factors are not feelings: you don't 'get'* them.

* Having written which, I expect to receive complaints: of course, someone will respond, you can get sunny weather, or you can get mumps: surely they can be factors that affect your life ? True: but I still insist that you cannot correctly talk or write of 'getting a factor'.

" Got any good factors lately ?"

A Matter of Factors

Cliches that stale, metaphors that die

I’m not what you might call politically aligned with the Daily Telegraph, but I believe its Letters Editor Christopher Howse and its Style-Guide Updater Richard Preston deserve praise for daring to criticise twenty-first-century popular jargon and cliché in their little book (Constable, 2007) She Literally Exploded.

It is daring, because there are hundreds of thousands of people out there who would retort “Oh, come off it. It’s only words for God’s sake. What a sad old so-and-so you must be ! Get a life” etc etc etc. To stand up and be counted (I hoped that phrase would be featured in the book, but it wasn’t) as one who cares about words and the English language is to draw down upon oneself the scorn not only (to continue the flow of cliché) of the man and woman in the street, including of course the ubiquitous Mr and Mrs Joe Public, but also of quite a number of progressive teachers and lecturers and writers who believe that the notion that a spoken statement or a printed paragraph can fairly be assessed for the quality of its composition is bunk.

Get the book, have yourself a good laugh (there’s an irksome idiom !) and be ashamed, be very ashamed (there goes another) if you recognise your own verbal follies in it. Mind you, a lot of the phrases that must now be rated as tedious clichés - such as ‘joined-up government’ and ‘re-invent the wheel’ and even ‘leave no stone unturned’ - were fresh and witty metaphors when they were young.

But witty metaphors, like ripe fruit, have a short shelf life and soon become wrinkled and unappetising. Even so, there are always people who poke around hopefully in the ‘expired sell-by date’ shelf in case they can find something they can use.

Cliches that stale, metaphors that die