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Mind your language

Existential threat: the birth of a cliché

A word that didn’t arrive in English until 1941 is already bonded into nonsense

24 January 2015

9:00 AM

24 January 2015

9:00 AM

In the endless game of word association that governs vocabulary, the current favourite as a partner of existential is threat. They make an odd couple. Max Hastings managed to get them into the Daily Mail the other day, writing that ‘although Islamic fanatics can cause us pain and grief, they pose no existential threat as did Hitler’s Germany’.

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