Mind your language
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.
We’ve also been told that a solution to the Middle East is something that needs to be brokered; and we’ve heard about people seeking a solution to how the planets were formed; a solution to the West Lothian Question; a solution to teenage chlamydia; a solution to holiday crowding in China; a solution to ‘blue on blue’ incidents, also known as ‘friendly fire’; a solution to voting apathy; storage solutions; security solutions; solutions for the non-chemical control of bracken; solutions to incivility, solutions to re-offending. Note that there is no agreement about whether the thing to be solved is the desideratum or its opposite. A storage solution seeks storage; a friendlyfire solution does not seek friendly-fire but its avoidance.
The streets are crowded with advertisements for solutions to things that one never considered a problem. A Volkswagen scheme simply called Solutions provides car-purchase finance: ‘Under Solutions, a Fox can be had from just £89 per month’. A Fox is a kind of car, I think.
A company called Northgate Information Solutions is an outsourcing firm and has apparently offered ‘£257 million to buy the Belgian humanresources services provider Arinso’. This is all to do with hiring hands, it seems, as is Solutions recruitment: ‘Solutions recruitment is a leading provider of recruitment solutions,’ goes its selfreferential mission statement.
After all this it is comforting to see the modest claim next to the Telegraph crossword: ‘Solution 25,299’.
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