It’s funny how people hardly know what they are saying. I read recently of diplomats going to Riyadh ‘to diffuse tensions over anti-Islamic stickers’. Did the writer mean defuse? Probably. He was trying to say ‘reduce’ tensions and just reached for the nearest dead metaphor from the shelf.
Still, it doesn’t do to be too snooty about origins of words, as I have often told my husband, who responds by becoming narrower, shriller, louder and much snootier. What happens if you bother to look up diffuse in the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary? You find the first entry quotes from old John Florio’s World of Words from 1598, which spells it defuse. So do Philemon Holland (in his translation of Pliny) and the quarto edition of King Lear, with the meaning ‘confuse’. So much for the spelling.
Get Britain's best politics newsletters
Register to get The Spectator's insight and opinion straight to your inbox. You can then read two free articles each week.
Already a subscriber? Log in
Comments
Join the debate for just $5 for 3 months
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for $5.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just $5 for 3 monthsAlready a subscriber? Log in