Dot Wordsworth

Envelope

Pre-paid letter sheets were all the rage – until a little thing called a ‘stamp’ was introduced

issue 22 April 2017

One can push many things — a pen, one’s luck or (up) daisies.

But the MP Dominic Raab told the Daily Telegraph last week that Theresa May and Boris Johnson ‘are demonstrating courage in pushing the diplomatic envelope’. Since the most famous envelope recently enclosed Mrs May’s letter to Donald Tusk, this figure of speech might have obscured rather than illuminated his meaning.

I don’t mean to write about pushing the envelope, on which I’ve remarked before. The metaphor is from aeronautics, where it refers to parameters (often confused with perimeters) or limits. The late Gerald Kaufman complained of this Eurojargon 37 years ago, explaining in a book that ‘an envelope is a limit within which budgetary dispositions can be juggled’.

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