Mea Culpa: Mexican wine aggravates the traditionalists

A picture caption this week on an article about Mexican wine triggered a reflex in me: “Baja has been compared to a ‘laid-back Napa’ – which aggravates the local winemakers.” I was taught that aggravate means to make something worse, and that it was “wrong” to use it simply to mean “irritate”.

But language evolves, and I was surprised to come across this undogmatic note in the Oxford Dictionary entry: “Aggravate in the sense ‘annoy or exasperate’ dates back to the 17th century and has been so used by respected writers ever since. This use is still regarded as incorrect by some traditionalists on the grounds that it is too radical a departure from the etymological meaning of ‘make heavy’. It is, however, comparable to meaning changes in hundreds of other words which have long been accepted without comment.”

Well, that’s us traditionalists told.

Pushing the bounds: In an editorial last weekend on the Brexit talks, we said €20bn and €60bn “have become the parameters for the UK’s so-called divorce bill in exiting the European Union”. It is obvious what we meant, but it is not what parameter means in mathematics.

In maths, a parameter is a constant. For example, if a tree grows at 20cm a year, its height in cm would be 20x the number of years it has been growing. The variable in that formula is the number of years and the parameter is 20. For a different species of tree, the parameter would be different.

We were using parameter, on the other hand, to refer to the two sides’ negotiating positions, the limits between which a final figure would be agreed. We could have said “limits of” instead of “parameters for”, but that doesn’t quite convey the sense we wanted.

I have to conclude, therefore, that we were justified in using parameter here. Because it sounds like perimeter, it is commonly used now to mean the boundaries within which people operate.

As I said, language evolves, and here is a useful word, detached from its specialist meaning, for which there isn’t a better alternative.

Accident waiting to happen: Having absolved the editorial-writer on that front, I have to make an adverse finding on another question. The editorial ends by describing the Government’s handling of Brexit as a “slow-motion car crash”, which, as Robert Boston writes to point out, is a phrase we should see only in reports of road traffic accidents.

It is a cliché, but it is a particularly undesirable one, because it could cause distress to anyone who has lost friends or family in a car crash. This was brought home to me when an interview with Natalie Bennett, the former Green Party leader, was widely described as a car crash. Her mother died in one.

Innocence: In a report of Donald Trump downplaying Russian meddling in his election, we said: “Senator John McCain was concerned about Mr Trump’s naivete.” Julian Self wrote to say: “I would have expected to see ‘naivety’.” So would I. There is no need to lapse into the French spelling just because it’s a posh word. This may be a hangover from when, several years ago, we might have put two dots over the “i”, but that is fortunately now rare.