Will this nonsense language dull our reality or will we be bored to death before the virus reaches us?

ot on the heels of the coronavirus infection has come the infection of our language. Covid-19 will pass. The other disease may be more permanent. Within not days but minutes – even seconds – this potentially more long-lasting infection of our speech passed from politicians to reporters to the people. Few of us now question the loaded phrases, the old cliches put to new use, the tired metaphors and the weary references to war and frontlines – even, inevitably I suppose, to the Second World War. It was there yet again in Boris Johnson’s lacklustre new set of "instructions" last night.

If we “self-isolate”, I suspect we are not just closing our front doors. We are also isolating meaning, destroying semantics, misusing our language, mixing cliché with weary metaphor. It won’t make the virus go away, but it will self-isolate the words we speak. Perhaps for a long time. And be sure, there will be more of them.

Last night’s address to the nation contained many of Johnson’s more tiresome and repetitive expressions: “fantastic”, “absolutely”, “amazing”. And the usual comic-cuts logos: twice Covid-19 was “the invisible killer” against which we would “turn the tide” (like Canute, perhaps). The British will “rise to that challenge” as “they have in the past so many times”. What did this mean? Was this another yet another reference to the Luftwaffe bombing of Britain? Or the Brexit vote?

“We will come through stronger than ever,” Johnson insisted. But how, for goodness sake? The British have been “enlisted” in the fight. Good soldiers all. But if Britons are so dedicated to "turning the tide’", what was all this talk of coercion; the “instruction” with which the prime minister would “ensure compliance” from his people, the threats – “if you don’t follow the rules, the police will have the powers to enforce them” – and the two eerie references to “dispersing gatherings”? What was he talking about? House parties, we must assume, or ad hoc football games in the park. Fair enough. But what if the gatherings occurred because more than two people wanted to protest at Johnson’s “instructions”?