A game of chess?

 

A game of chess?

Image courtesy Wikimedia Commons

Is politics a game of chess, or it is a guessing game? It shouldn’t be a game at all, of course, but it provides material for discussion.

There was a clever cartoon by Ella Baron in The Times this morning, so clever that I had to read the comments to understand it! Nothing unusual there.

I have not reproduced it here, as I don’t want to infringe copyright.

It was a satirical comment on the latest unsuccessful talks between the US and Iran, and showed J.D. Vance and his team facing Iranian negotiators across a table. Vance is holding a handful of playing cards, interestingly all showing Kings, and declaring, ‘We have all the cards.’ Their opponents have a chess board in front of them, so the two sides are not even playing the same game, which is a telling point. The Iranian spokesman is saying, ‘Checkmate,’ even though the chess position is not showing that.

‘Checkmate’ is a corruption of the Persian phrase. ‘Shah Mat,’ meaning ‘The King is dead.’

Invitations

 

Invitations

Increasingly, during news programmes, we are invited to ‘have a listen to’ an item or a speaker. Is it a friendly, informal way of introducing a snippet of news, or are we being patronised, or even infantilised?

It’s not discourteous to say, ‘Listen to the next item.’

Sometimes we are asked to ‘have a read of’ an article. It’s not a slice of cake to be held in the hand. I don’t ‘have a read’ of a book – I just read it.

We have always ‘had a look at’ things, though perhaps we should say, ‘Look at this,’ but asking someone to ‘have a taste of’ a dish would be more easily expressed as, ‘try this,’ or ‘taste this.’

Must we mangle the language so badly that it bears no relation to what we actually mean? Do we have to wrap every sentence in extraneous vocabulary to make them more acceptable? It’s not good to be peremptory, but it makes little sense to add unnecessary words. They don’t clarify matters.

After I had written this moaning, whingeing piece, I read an article by Giles Coren in The Times. He writes so well.