Challenging ‘challenging’

‘Pistols at dawn,’ said my husband, flapping a pair of Marigold rubber gloves from the other side of the kitchen.

‘I don’t want to know what you mean by that,’ I replied, hoping not to encourage him.

‘Being challenging,’ he said, ignoring my implied request.

We had been discussing a report in the Daily Telegraph about the impenetrability of the language of the art establishment. Sir Peter Bazalgette had been complaining about this, but the examples given came from a book by Philip Hook called Breakfast at Sotheby’s. In his amusing devil’s dictionary, honest meant ‘inept’, unmediated ‘direct’, challenging ‘obscure’, and difficult one step in obscurity beyond challenging.

Challenging comes in two flavours: good and bad. Bad is when it is being done to you; good when you are doing the challenging. It began life as bad. In the 1970s it was mostly problems that were challenging: pollution or high-density air traffic. In the current century, problems have been abolished, to be replaced with issues. In business, challenging issues in a report suggest that a company is on the skids.

As far as behaviour goes, the challenging is either to be defeated or to prevail, according to the usual ‘them or us’ criterion. For them, especially the young, challenging behaviour is shop-lifting or burning down the house. For us, challenging someone’s behaviour means locking the drunk husband out of the house or asking someone in a quiet carriage to turn down his music.

It is odd that challenging should enjoy such a blossoming when the euphemistic challenged has been laughed out of use, at least in my circles. Perhaps it holds on in some redoubt of the NHS or new universities.

If artists are praised for work that is challenging, then we poor gallery-fodder are constantly being challenged, not vertically but artistically, and it’s seldom pleasant.