An Irish Diary

Ready, aim, duck – An Irishman’s Diary about misfiring metaphors

Goya’s ‘Third of May’, now in Madrid’s Prado Museum

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Frank McNally
Sat May 5 2018 - 00:01

Concerned reader Damien Maguire has copied me in on a letter he sent to the other Times newspaper (the one without an adjective) on Wednesday, objecting to its misuse of the term "firing line".

In an editorial earlier in the week, our near namesakes had suggested that "barely a month passes when the HSE is not in the firing line". By which, of course, they meant to suggest that the Health Service Executive was being shot at, metaphorically. Whereas the true implication of their "beaten old cliché", as Damien calls it, is that the HSE was the one shooting.

Fortunately, he had a helpful suggestion. It was inspired by Wednesday being the “Third of May”, a date notorious in Spanish history for a massacre by Napoleonic troops in 1808.

The latter event is immortalised in a famous painting of the same name by Goya, now in Madrid’s Prado Museum.

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Hence Damien’s proposal that every journalist who misuses the metaphor “should be frogmarched into the Prado and made to stand in front of Goya’s painting until he/she understands the difference between ‘line of fire’ and ‘firing line’. It’s not difficult. All you have to remember is that the lad in the white shirt with arms outstretched is in the line of fire, like the HSE.”

Alas, I see a problem with Damien’s plan.

Never mind the cost to newspapers, the prospect of a free trip to Madrid for every errant journalist would be far too attractive to have the desired effect.

I know some old-school chief subeditors who instead, if they could, would bypass the Goya option and bring back actual firing squads for reporters making mistakes. But the costs of that would be prohibitive too. Also, health and safety: the most chief-subs would get away with now are mock executions.

In general, probably, the firing line/line of fire confusion arises from a lack of concrete examples in everyday life.

That’s what happens when metaphors outlive their original context. And clearly, here, there has been an overall gain for humanity, albeit at the expense of clear English.

I’m reminded of the centuries-long decline of the word decimate. It used to have an admirably concise meaning, ie “to reduce by one-tenth”, as in the charming Roman custom of putting to death one in every ten of a mutinous or cowardly group of soldiers, as a motivational tool for the others.

That practice was revived briefly in 16th-century Ireland by Lord Essex, when his English troops were proving less than enthusiastic about facing the enemy.

But in truth there hasn’t been much call for the word’s original meaning recently.

And even though the popularity of soccer would provide the perfect context for retaining its precision in figurative usage – a red card can still eliminate exactly 10 per cent of a team's outfield force – the word is now increasingly applied in a much broader sense, non-decimal as well as non-fatal. Fowler's Dictionary of Modern English considers this "acceptable". The fall of Rome continues.

Mixing up firing lines with lines of fire is at least unlikely to be dangerous these days. But there are still circumstances in which bad English can threaten life. Fire, in the general sense, is one of them, and led to a rare example of changes to language being enforced by safety considerations.

Until the 20th century, a thing that burned easily was described as “inflammable”. It still is, in dictionaries.

But official concern in Britain that people might mistake the intensifying “in” prefix with the nullifying “un” led to the invention of a new term, “flammable”, to remove all doubt.

Interestingly, the problem must not have extended to Northern Ireland. I recall that the Belfast punk band Stiff Little Fingers made their debut in 1979 with an album titled Inflammable Material. If anything, that was taken too literally.

When they released the song Suspect Device as a single, in a form suggesting a cassette bomb, one record company recipient threw it into a bucket of water.

Which brings me back to this week’s events because, as readers may recall, that retro phrase “suspect device” made a brief comeback in Irish media on Monday when Dublin’s Connolly Station was evacuated after the discovery of explosive material.

The material was removed safely, and Iarnród Éireann said afterwards it had been “historic in nature”. But I think what they meant was “historical” – not the same thing. The rule is: “Any past event is historical. Only the most memorable ones are historic.”

When explosive material becomes historic, it’s usually bad news. But I’m sure we’d have heard by now.

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