Across

The word of the year is across. Earlier this month someone on the radio spoke of hospital experiences ‘across the patient journey’. The meaning was ‘throughout’. It is universality that across is now felt to express. A widely favoured, seldom understood figure of speech is across the piece. Proof of the obscurity of its application, even for those who use it, is that they often make it across the piste, as if it came from skiing.

Across is everywhere. In the Independent, Alexander Lebedev wrote about promoting ‘fair journalism across the globe’. One might think it would be round the globe, or perhaps around the globe. There is a difference between round and around. The latter has become more popular under the influence of America, where round is often seen as an abbreviation of around. Even so, Jane Austen, in Emma, wrote around (as an adverb) where we would expect round: ‘They both looked around, and she was obliged to join them.’ They weren’t looking all around them; they were merely turning round and looking behind them.

Other prepositions fit the world when it is not considered as globular. Bob Dylan, in ‘Man of Constant Sorrow’, sang that he was bound to ramble through the world, although the man I think he was copying, Roscoe Holcomb, made it in the world.

An orgy of across came in a newspaper article about Christmas television. Phil Boucher wrote of ‘films across the three days from December 24 to 26’; ‘movies shown across the peak Christmas season’; ‘656 films being screened across all channels’; and ‘just one film premiere across the same period’. The normal prepositions here would be in or on, but the connotation sought was complete extension: not just in a thing, but throughout it.