Are you a Cameronette or more of a Milifan? Do you like to flex your work in a balanced way? Steven Poole on creative verb use, spads and spin
It is always pleasant when a general election brings us neologisms as well as new ways to twist old words. Perhaps this one will be remembered mainly for “Milifandom”, the term made popular by a teenage girl called Abby on Twitter. (Symptoms of this sudden adoration of “Bed Ed” included Photoshopping his head on to the rippling torsos of Sylvester Stallone and David Beckham.) The Conservative-fancying rival hashtag “Cameronettes” was definitely not a desperate spin tactic dreamed up by a 20-year-old spad, but it seemed ill chosen anyway. “Cameronettes” sounds like “marionettes”, or maybe sock-puppets. A more poetically satisfying twin to “Milifandom” would have been a grassroots movement of ordinary billionaires operating under the hashtag “Camer-non-doms”.
Before all this frivolity erupted, the key phrase of the first leaders’ debate had been “balancing the books”. If it doesn’t put you in mind of a weird literary game of Jenga, this probably seems a rather twee domestic metaphor. Oddly, everyone silently accepts that “balancing the books” specifically means “cutting spending”, even while most economists agree that deficit and debt reduction is more effectively achieved through economic growth (though that is a whole other rhetorical can of worms). It was certainly thrilling, though, to see Ed Miliband and Nick Clegg face off over who could use the phrase more often. By my somnolent count, Clegg won, with seven “balance the books” or “balancing the books” to Miliband’s six.
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