A word game that just isn’t funny anymore

I’m sure that many of you will have played the business word game. The one where you give a presentation or speech and are tasked by your colleagues to include an incongruous word into the mix. Failure to meet the challenge usually means that the first round is on you next time you’re at the bar. When I was an account manager with a major health provider there was a wide scope for potentially ridiculous words to weave into the conversation – I seem to remember that ‘chronicity’ was a firm favourite and one of our customer service managers somehow managed to include ‘wheelbarrow’ into a placatory call to a disgruntled customer.

I’m sure that David Cameron is far too busy for silly games but I can’t help thinking that some wordplay is underfoot within the Coalition.

‘No-one knows more about the NHS than Andrew Lansley’ said Andrew Mitchell, Secretary of State for International Development, looking very uncomfortable when questioned by Andrew Marr about the Health Bill on the BBC today.

‘No-one knows more about the NHS than Andrew Lansley’ said William Hague, Foreign Secretary, looking very uncomfortable when questioned by Andrew Marr about the Health Bill on the BBC a week ago

‘No-one knows more about the NHS than Andrew Lansley’ said the Prime Minister as reported in the Guardian newspaper last year.

If this is a word game – they’re not very good at it. For a start, the phrase or word is supposed to believable within the context in which it’s used. If this is the only argument the government can muster in reply to Health Bill opponents then they clearly are running out of arguments. If ‘no-one’ knows more about the NHS than Andrew Lansley then let’s give ‘no-one’ the job of UK Secretary of State for Health. Clearly Lansley’s ‘in-depth knowledge’ hasn’t stretched to understanding how to engage the support of most of the people he needs on side to make his reforms work.

Or is this a cunning ploy to personalise the Bill in Lansley’s name? Has the cabinet been instructed to pin the Bill indelibly to the hapless Health Secretary’s mast so that when it all goes horribly wrong he will be the only scapegoat? I wonder.

But back to word games – chronicity means …’of long duration, lasting for a long period of time or marked by frequent occurrence, subject to a habit or pattern of behaviour for a long time’.

Perhaps the choice of word for our silly game a few years ago was strangely prophetic….