‘That’ll be the old pivot again,’ said Amol Rajan on Today last week. He was interviewing Pat McFadden, who is the shadow chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, since the Duchy needs its chancellor shadowed. Amol, as I think of him since he sounds so young (though he is 41 on election day), suggested that it was hard to trust Sir Keir Starmer as he had campaigned for Jeremy Corbyn.
Pat (as I don’t think of him at 59) said that, unlike Corbyn, Liz Truss was on the loose in Norfolk as a Tory candidate despite the mess she’d made. I took the subsequent pivot remark to be a metaphor taken from a pair of dividers, perhaps, with a point anchored in the question asked and the other turning to skewer a more distant topic. Someone emailed me after the programme suggesting that Amol Rajan had just discovered the word. But three years ago he wrote about a ‘pivot in our politics from a socioeconomic axis (class) to a sociocultural axis (identity)’. True.
It’s not just him. In the papers we are overwhelmed with pivots, some of very weak metaphorical force. Often the meaning is no more than ‘to move, change, switch, follow a new tendency, take an initiative’.
Rather charmingly, the earliest use of pivot as a noun is in a Yorkshire will from 1398 bequeathing two pairs of pivot-shears. The verb dates only from the 19th century. Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, wrote in 1872 that ‘Christ’s ministry was pivoting upon Capernaum’. She meant ‘hinging’, just as cardinal points depend on a hinge, Latin cardo.
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