Everybody’s saying it, even though the latest research declares that only 6 per cent of the population is given to the habit. I mean saying an historic.
Sir John Major, though a Knight of the Garter, is proud of his origins in Brixton and Worcester Park, but started the present vogue at Chatham House in February by saying in a speech that the referendum vote to leave the EU was ‘an historic mistake’. On 29 March, when Donald Tusk received Theresa May’s letter triggering, not Article 50 (which itself was the trigger), but the process of leaving, the Prime Minister said: ‘This is an historic moment from which there is no turning back.’
You wouldn’t have known that from Robert Peston’s tweet for the occasion, which reported that she had called it ‘a historic moment’. So did the Sun, which is strange, because it often refers to things like ‘an historic win at Ibrox’.
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