Dot Wordsworth

Mind your language | 12 May 2007

A Lexicographer writes

issue 12 May 2007

Whoever said, ‘Don’t give me problems, give me solutions’, was asking for it. Everyone seems to be claiming solutions now. I went past a children’s nursery the other day with a sign on the wall reading: Bright Horizons Family Solutions. ‘Bright Horizons Family Solutions,’ the company tells the world, ‘is the nation’s leading provider of work-site child care, early education, and work-life consulting services.’

It has got some competitors, such as Family Solutions Collaborative, the Centre for Family Solutions, Family Solution Inc, Trillium Family Solutions, the Family Solutions Institute, Systemic Family Solutions and Total Family Solutions. That terrible phrase ‘the Final Solution’ makes all this sound rather creepy.

Now that I’ve noticed it, I find solutions all over the place. In the newspapers in the past week we were told by the Times that the French elections were about the choice between market solutions and state solutions.

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