By Jeremy Fugleberg
Casper Star-Tribune
The new year is upon us. While you ponder losing more weight and saving more money, I ask you to also rise to the challenge of words. Slay the dragon of lazy metaphor in 2013 and quench the raging fire of cliched words and phrases.
Yes, I know I just used a bunch of cliches. It’s easy to do, and a cheap and often effective way to get a message across. But they’re also often used to mask what someone really means. They’re far too common in discussions about energy and environmental issues.
Here’s my year’s end list of words and phrases I promise to ditch in 2013. I hope you will too, and I hope you spread the word. It’s a long list. Hopefully it’ll be shorter next year. Hopefully.
‘Winners and losers’
User: Energy industry groups, politicians, regulators.
What users think it means: “I don’t want the government involved in this sector of the economy.”
What users really mean: “I want the government to support the things I want and not the things I don’t.”
Have you picked a winner and loser today? It seems that everybody did in 2012, or at least was accused of doing so. This expression is a cheap way of pretending you want someone to stay out of influencing something, and it’s often used as another way of saying you want the free market to decide whether a project, company or energy source lives or dies. But don’t be fooled by this oversimplification. The truth is that government and business live in the same world and deal in the same economy. It’s seldom possible to pull them fully apart.
