Dialogue: The robust issue is these kind of people aren't creative

By JOE BENNETT

There are vogues in language. A word surfaces from the depths of the dictionary and for a while everyone in public life uses it, and uses it wrongly. Then the word fades from popularity, sinks back into the dictionary and another arises.

"Substantive" was such a word. Jim Bolger liked substantive. He used it to describe anything he approved of. Toadies all around him took it up. Then, when he went, it went.

In came Jenny Shipley, and with her came "robust". She used it to mean substantive.

The toadies took it up. Now she's gone I think robust is following her. It will be happy in Ashburton.

But the misuse of some words proves more durable and more dangerous. For a month I kept a list of words that got my goat.

It grew long and now I've lost it. But I can remember the first two words on that list. The second one was "issue".

Issues abound and they don't mean what the dictionary says they should mean.

In fact they don't mean much beyond a vague sense of negative feelings that the speaker is frightened to face. "There are a few issues around the closing of the Hokitika hospital." In other and more frightening words, the people of Hokitika don't like it.

This evasive use of issue has the texture of a used bandage. With any luck it will go the way of substantive. But I am not confident.

Words help us to think. It may be possible to think without words but it's not much use.

What we can't express we don't remember and, anyway, if we can't express it, we aren't going to influence anyone else or get much done.

There's a limit to what can be achieved with grunt and gesture. If there weren't, chimps would run the world.

I'd thought "it's all about" was dying. Then I heard John Prescott, the Deputy Prime Minister of, God help it, Britain.

I once wrote nice things about Mr Prescott because he punched a man who threw an egg at him. I take it all back. I was wrong.

Mr Prescott came here to sing unconvincing hymns of praise to St Anthony Blair and to do ra ra with the Labour Party. He made a speech which consisted mainly of "it's all about".

Having lost my list, I quote from memory: "It's all about delivering on your promises. It's all about gaining the trust of the electorate. It's all about winning landslide elections such as the one we just had in which a bit over half of the British electorate voted Labour."

It's all about, at best, means "here's something I like". It's a grammatical variant of substantive. When used in a speech it operates like a premonitory cough, warning the audience of the approach of something platitudinous but clappable.

"It's all about passion," says the coach of the All Blacks while neglecting to remind them to catch the ball first.

Petty? Of course I'm petty. Petty derives from petit and petit means small and language is made of small bits called words. Words are bricks. You can't build an edifice with bricks that crumble. It won't prove substantive.

Besides, I've barely started to get petty. What about the hugely popular "these kind of people" or "these kind of things"?

It's perfectly understandable how this illiteracy came about but to understand all is not to forgive all. To say "these kind" is like saying "these brick".

More often than not you can remove the "kind of" and simply say "these people", a phrase which admits who you're talking about and so avoids avoiding the truth.

But if you find you really can't get rid of "kind of", turn it round and say "people like this". It's more emphatic, and thus better. But "these kind of" is merely illiterate.

I object more fiercely to words that deceive. And prime among these is the word that headed my list of goat-getters. It is "creative".

I hold no hope that creative will die. It is enshrined in our bureaucracy. We have Creative New Zealand.

Creative should mean inventive or imaginative.

It should, for example, be used to describe the very clever man who devised the animation system that made the America's Cup racing not only understandable but even enjoyable.

But it isn't. Instead, creative is used in a way that makes, as Evelyn Waugh put it in perhaps his most memorable phrase, my bowels shrivel. Creative has been appropriated for the exclusive use of bad artists.

Creative describes the people who write, paint, pot or sculpt things that other people don't want to buy. Creative has come to mean corduroy trousers, and misshapen sweaters spun from pure self-indulgence.

If I hadn't lost my list, I could go on. But I have, so I won't.