We were discussing, and mainly disapproving of, changes and new phrases in English, which has been clearly being going downhill since the Anglo-Saxon Chronicles. But doesn’t the reverse happen – that some phrases linger on, referring to something that no longer exists or have a changed meaning?
I saw someone describing Priti Patel trying to appeal to the blue-rinse brigade, meaning elderly, conservative women. But the only blue rinses I’ve seen recently have been on hip young visitors to Camden, not Molly Sugdens. You still get people saying today’s newspapers are tomorrow’s chip wrappings, although that has been banned under health regulations for as long as I can remember. And Jess Philips, who I quite like on the whole, said recently that she always has a typical voter in mind – a middle-aged woman called Brenda. A girl born in about 1970, who would now be middle aged, would be far more likely to be called Nicola or Sarah, or even Jess. She is forgetting perhaps that is her contemporaries who are now either middle-aged or approaching it, not their parents.
I suppose it’s a bit like Microsoft Word still using a floppy disk icon as the Save button, » Continue Reading.