This shouldn't be seen as coming out of left field. [Link]It infects every area of life. In September, a Labour whip said that "British Muslims need to step up to the plate". Even the footballer, Joey Barton, on emerging from prison to play again for Newcastle United, said that "I am always one to step up to the plate." Oh, Joey, Joey. Couldn't you just have been the one to step up to the penalty spot?
George Orwell warned us about all this more than 60 years ago. In his 1946 essay, Politics and the English Language, he wrote about the dangers of "a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves". He suggested that "many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning ... a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying".
This is what is so disturbing about "stepping up to the plate". Have the people who use it ever seen a baseball game? What's so great about stepping up to the plate anyway? You just put one foot in front of the other. And not only has the government been importing the use of the phrase, but even ideas from the game itself. The "three strikes and you're out" idea for punishing offenders is plucked straight from baseball. In terms of penal efficacy, it is like a middle-order English batting collapse, and we should never have introduced it into our own judicial system.
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