Mea Culpa: the ongoing undesirability of ‘ongoing’

Any piece of writing can be improved by deleting the word “ongoing”. We wrote this week about the Leave Means Leave marchers, and said they are worried that the vote of the 17.4 million people who supported Brexit is “being undermined by ongoing delays”.

On the sports pages, meanwhile, we said that should Derby County return to the Premier League, they will do so “looking to end an ongoing record run of 32 games without a win”; and in foreign news we reported on “the ongoing crisis of rheumatic heart disease in low-income countries”.

In none of these cases did we need “ongoing”. It was clear in each case that we were talking about something that was continuing – although in the case of Brexit there has been only one delay so far.

The word became popular in the 1960s, although I am sure some anti-pedant is going to tell me it was first used by Chaucer in the ongoing tales of Canterbury or something. Or a descriptivist will tell me that it obviously served a purpose, filling a gap in the language that people found useful.

Maybe so, but in my opinion there are always better ways of filling that gap.

Linguistic revival: I recently mentioned the journalistic fashion for describing public figures in trouble as “beleaguered”, suggesting it was overused. This week, however, we managed to use it in an unusual way, as a verb. A report began: “Justin Trudeau apologised for munching on a chocolate bar in parliament as he battled the corruption scandal beleaguering his government.”

The usual word there would be “besieging”, but as beleaguered is the adjective from the semi-extinct verb beleaguer, which means roughly the same thing, we should be pleased to see it brought back to life.

Still going on: Unfortunately, that report went on to use the word “ongoing”. It said: “Opposition MP Scott Reid first suggested that Mr Trudeau was ‘hiding a bagel in his desk’. He then took the opportunity to refer to the ongoing controversy, in which a government contractor is accused of bribing Libyan officials to secure work during the regime of Muammar Gaddafi.”

There we couldn’t simply delete the word, because it serves to distinguish the controversy over food in the parliament chamber, which is against the rules, from the larger one, which had already been mentioned. We could have said: “He then referred to the controversy over a government contractor accused of…”

Cosmic: This is rather dated pedantry from the Cold War, but we described Yuri Gagarin as an astronaut. He was the first person in space, and a national hero in the USSR, then engaged in the space race with the US. Part of that competition was fought over language: American space venturers were called astronauts; Russian ones were called cosmonauts. Thanks to Mick O’Hare for reminding us.