Political commentators love talking about the optics — the way something looks to voters. Just at the moment, though, everyone seems to be talking about upticks.
Usually it is to do with local increases in coronavirus cases. But my husband, not above reading the sports pages, found that Juventus was wondering whether Cristiano Ronaldo had brought ‘a big enough uptick in their revenues’.
It is an increase, then. But where does the figure of speech come from? Is it from a graph showing a blip like a V-shaped recovery, which resembles the sort of tick that goes in a box (for those with a tick-box mentality)? I think this idea is reinforced by that of sums ticking up like the meter in a taxi. Moreover, to a world once served by the ticker tape (bringing news to financial houses and the entrance halls of clubs), there entered in the 1980s the term tick meaning ‘the smallest amount by which prices are deemed to fluctuate’.
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