My husband has taken to crying out or braying ‘Haar, ha!’ at the wireless whenever he hears something particularly foolish, which is quite often. His bray was even louder than usual when one of those endless trailers invited us all to ‘dive deeper’.
Like a tornado, this figure of speech has thickened into reality within the lifetime of most of us. No example earlier than 1986 has been found by the Oxford English Dictionary, which quotes a New York Times review of a television programme of that year, ‘a deep dive into nostalgia’ with the help of ‘old newsreel and movie clips’.
The metaphor is intended to convey the sense of an ‘in-depth examination’. Indeed, Ofsted has been using the phrase for ‘the process that inspectors use to gain a deeper understanding’ of a school’s curriculum. In that hope they ask questions like: ‘Why is this subject taught in this way?’ You may be sure that they would not mark highly an answer like ‘No one knows’ or ‘Because it always has been’, even though such answers must apply to some of our most treasured institutions: the monarchy, the constitution, the law, the Church, families, ancient universities, buildings, manners. Take them apart and you can’t put them together again, as they will have died.
But I’ve noticed that many claimed deep-divers are nothing of the sort. A Guardian critic wrote of ‘deep-dive characterisation’ in a television drama, probably meaning no more than ‘three-dimensional’. The nearest thing to a deep-dive in broadcasting is In Our Time, and that skims a big subject – the philosophy of Philippa Foot or the history of the Barbary Corsairs – in 45 minutes.
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