In terms of

‘One good term deserves another,’ said my husband in his infuriating way of almost making a joke. As he was talking to the wireless, it hardly mattered. His provocation, a serious one, I admit, was someone saying ‘in terms of’ when she meant no such thing. It is happening more and more, and my husband’s response is unvarying. It can’t go on.

If any meaning can be ascertained in the misuse of in terms of, perhaps ‘as for’ is the one often intended. Instead of saying: ‘As for a cheap holiday, you’ve left it too late’, people say: ‘In terms of a cheap holiday…’. There was a corker in a report last month in the Times-Picayune (of New Orleans) about beaches: ‘In terms of the United States, Louisiana was 20th in the country in terms of the weight of trash collected.’ The first example should have been blotted out; the second is bearable.

The problem is that the metaphor (like pushing the envelope) comes from mathematics, which few understand. (For the same reason, those who use parameter often seem to mean ‘perimeter’.) Sir John Herschel quite correctly wrote in 1866 about measuring the distance of Venus ‘in terms of the earth’s diameter’. The idea is simple enough, though I couldn’t do the trigonometry.

What confuses people (apart from trigonometry) is the quite different sense of terms, in phrases like in the strongest terms, or in general terms, where it means no more than ‘language’. In that sense it is possible to say: ‘We can speak in terms of the very highest praise’, but not ‘in terms of the Earth’s diameter’.

We have been through something similar before, because Boethius in the sixth century loved to use terminus to mean one of the two numbers in a ratio (such as 3:5) or the extremes in a series (2 and 8, in 2,4,6,8).