Mind your language
MY HUSBAND interrupted my break- fast the other day by reading out bits of a front-page scoop by the 'media corre- spondent' of the Times. It was the text of a 'keynote address at Banqueting House, Whitehall' (I hadn't realised it was smart to drop the definite article with this name, as it is with Guildhall and Albany) by Mr Rupert Murdoch. He happens to be the proprietor of the Times.
Anyway, Mr Murdoch had a 'vision of a world in which national and class bar- riers are broken down by technological advances'. And 'addressing an audience drawn from British industry and politics which included Michael Howard, the Home Secretary, Rocco Forte, head of the Forte hotels group, Sir Mark Wein- berg, the financier, and Maurice Saatchi, the advertising guru, Mr Mur- doch also announced a ground-breaking partnership with British Telecom to develop new ways of sending informa- tion, pictures and sound along tele- phone cables'. There was quite a lot more of this sort of stuff, indeed so much that it had to be spread over pages 2, 5, 14 and 23.
Chambers dictionary gives keynote as meaning 'of fundamental importance' and it regards 'ground-breaking' as 'esp US'. Some people now use mould- breaking as a similar exciting hooray term for ground-breaking or indeed breaking down barriers. This mistaken image was popularised by the SDP, when there was an SDP and it thought it was breaking the mould of politics. In reality breaking the mould means 'pre- venting something from being repeat- able', as in, 'When they made her they broke the mould.'
But even by the time my husband had reached the word 'guru' I could see the writer was getting desperate. I sympa- thised; it is not every day one has to report one's proprietor's visions.
Dot Wordsworth
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