In drought

I could scarcely believe the feebleness of my husband’s little joke in declaring he would take less water with his whisky ‘to help with the drought’. I think he must have been watching repeats of Mock the Week while I am out. But the new cliché is that we are in drought. Sometimes this is preceded by officially. It’s there in the newspapers, although once at least the Guardian said we are ‘officially in a state of drought’.

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Matthew Lynn

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I can’t remember in drought being used as a set phrase before. It sounds a little technical and in some way like a diagnosis. The obvious parallel as a diagnosis is in shock, or perhaps in denial, but the model, as a technical classification, must be in recession. I shouldn’t be surprised if they begin to speak of negative precipitation, to mean the margin of evaporation over rainfall.