In his speech on immigration last week, David Cameron said a couple of funny things. I’m not talking about the politics. Heaven forbid. I mean the language. Why did he call the City of London ‘the financial epicentre of the world’? Epicentre means ‘the point over the centre’, and in seismology it is the place on the Earth’s surface above the subterranean seat of an earthquake. So, unless he believes in an army of immigrant Morlocks slaving away beneath the City, I’d imagine Mr Cameron just meant centre. Epicentre sounds classier.
Then he spoke of worries about ‘the scale of people coming into the country’. I doubt that he thinks them too tall or too short or badly proportioned. It is the scale of the immigration that’s the trouble.
This may betray woolly thinking, but the language is presumably that of the speechwriter, and it is hard to iron out these wrinkles in a discussion by committee. As for the key word of the speech: ‘It boils down,’ said Mr Cameron, ‘to one word: control.’
Control can muddle conversations. I remember a discussion on Today with a European official who insisted that British fishing vessels must be controlled. She meant ‘checked’, and was using control in the sense that we see at Passport Control. That was the medieval meaning of the word — checking a roll against a counter-roll, or contrerolle in French. In the 19th century a parallel idea in empirical science was expressed by control experiment.
In 1963 John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came In from the Cold introduced us to the use of control to mean a member of an intelligence organisation who personally directed the activities of a spy. Today in Britain, in a session of word-association the next word that might come to mind is freak. Control freak has been around since 1977: ‘Control freak at the crossroads… one of those people who always had to know what was coming next,’ wrote Michael Herr in his book Dispatches, about the Vietnam war.
For politicians, control is hard to achieve. Last weekend, Gordon Brown said that it was ‘time to reset Scottish politics’. Perhaps we could reboot the whole political mechanism by pressing control-alt-delete.
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