Saatchi & Saatchi could have gone with ‘Labour’s Double Knockout’ for their Tory posters in the 1992 election campaign. Instead, they used the line ‘Labour’s Double Whammy’.
Nobody had heard or read the phrase before. All that stuff about speaking to your audience in their own language, use familiar words and phrases, assume at best a nodding acquaintance with the English language – all that was quietly dropped in favour of an expression that was new and alien.
Soon after the ads appeared, the newspapers were full of comment pieces about the wording. Where did ‘double whammy’ come from? What did it mean? Who dreamed it up? (Chris Patten, allegedly.) Was it an *gasp* Americanism? (I’d heard of the whammy bar, but that clearly wasn’t relevant here).
The public didn’t care about its provenance. But they could grasp exactly what it meant. And the expression is now firmly established in popular language.
This is why I don’t think we need to worry too much about the phrase ‘social distancing’. It might not be perfect. ‘Spatial distancing’ might convey the intended meaning more accurately, although it is a bit sci-fi. ‘Physical distancing’ sounds like something Gwyneth Paltrow might do. I said might. ‘Keep two metres away from each other’ sounds Ronseally straightforward until you remember that you’d have to include the imperial equivalent to appease the Daily Mail and its army of Little Englanders.
But from my observations, people are very quickly starting to learn what social distancing means to them in their daily lives. Sure, there’ll be those who choose to flout the advice, just as there are those who insist 40mph is okay in a 30mph zone or who see nothing wrong in dropping litter.
Sometimes, an unusual phrase is what’s needed to get standout and provoke a reaction.
BraveNewMalden 