I’m learning to hate the verb “to tackle”. Everybody, in the UK at least, seems to be “tackling” something. We are “tackling climate change”, though of course we aren’t, unless you count tut-tutting about China and India’s power stations, or massaging the figures to ignore what Al “the no-climate-change denier” Gore would never consider the inconvenient truth.
We are “tackling” ISIL and Islamic fundamentalism, except we’re not. We are “tackling” the economic migration across the Mediterranean but there are now many more queuing up than before we began “tackling” the problem, to meet a navy ship and an EU passport.
Poverty, cruelty, obesity, oh and ebola, you name it, someone is “tackling” it.
So you could argue that the verb “to tackle” is taking on a new meaning or two.
While the media wants you to hear that “tackling” is a positive, purposeful striving to fix something which, of course, all right thinking people agree needs “tackling”, it is also taking on a subtler shade of definition. Are we simply “tackling” the task of pushing water up a hill with a fork?