Flat growth

In one of our recent news stories, a union spokesperson was quoted as predicting "a flat growth of 3.275 million tonnes of road transport volumes, as in the fourth quarter of 2008".

'Flat growth' strikes me as an odd phrase, as it is in effect no growth at all. However Googling reveals it to be commonly used in economic contexts.

Here's an example from the BBC News website:



Anyone confused by the use of the phrase 'flat growth' in this headline would be enlightened by the first par ("the UK economy will not grow at all").

I think I need to micturate

Like all engine room stokers JD and I like our English plain and simple. But sometimes you have to admire writers who play with the language, even in ever-so-'umble trade magazines.

Our wittiest contributor recently came up with:

a case of micturation ‘twixt scapulae masquerading as precipitation

I recognised scapulae as shoulder blades and knew precipitation is a grown-up word for rain. But I confess to looking up micturation, which is when I realised he was telling our readers: "don't piss down my back and tell me it's raining".

Sadly it had to go because we can hardly expect our long-suffering readers to refer to their dictionaries simply to understand what they're reading, but it did make me smile.

Only a similar note, it occurs to me that an erroneous vertically delineated canine-arboreal interface might be an impressive replacement for a dog barking up the wrong tree.

Would anyone out there care to come up with more silly versions of common phrases?

Idioms: cut the mustard

A great quote in some recent copy:

"Our economic regeneration team has been sitting down and figuring out how to get this application to cut mustard"

Well, you could always laminate the application form – which would make it sturdier and possibly also mustard-proof. Or else you could print the application directly on to a knife or other cutting tool.

Seriously, all it took was for the idiom to be used slightly unusually ('cut mustard' instead of 'cut the mustard') and on first glance I read it literally rather than idiomatically. That's the danger of idioms – apart from totally confusing non-native speakers, of course.


And if you are interested in the origins of this idiom, the World Wide Words page on 'cut the mustard' is a good place to start – or else check out Yahoo! Answers for some alternative explanations.