Something funny happened when my husband yawned. I yawned. That wasn’t the funny thing. The funny thing was that I recognised the chain reaction from somewhere else. It was from Start the Week on Radio 4, where somebody spoke of pushing back. Before the programme was over, everyone seemed to say push back.
They applied push back not to a chair, or even the date of an event (or, as the politicians would say, the rollout of some piece of meddling). No, theirs was a metaphorical usage, of sometimes no precise meaning. It is popular with academics and denizens of the Westminster bubble. I heard a high-flyer from the Department of Energy use it a couple of days later. It is so much in vogue as to be a late bidder as word of the year, overtaking selfie and twerk.
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