- Hamas hammered - 17th October 2024
- Wordplay part two - 17th October 2024
- Tough nut - 16th October 2024
During a 40 year career as a journalist, for our Editor Phil Parry sizes have always been crucial (for example in giving the numbers at a protest march), but more and more today the lazy cliché is given that something is the ‘size of Wales’…
There must be a better way of doing it!
It should have been consigned to the history books, but ever more often now we are STILL seeing an area given as ‘the size of Wales’.
Only the other day in The Economist we were offered: “(Solar) panels now occupy an area half that of Wales…”.
There is even a ‘Green’ charity with that for its name, and they would surely approve of the number of solar panels we have now, although they might not endorse the style of measurement for it!
The Charity Commission says about the website and organisation: “Size of Wales aims to engage the people in Wales in helping to protect an area of tropical forests totaling two million hectares, through direct fundraising with employers, individuals, companies and match funding the fundraising efforts of our partners. Size of Wales also raises awareness, in Wales and the wider UK, of the importance of tropical forests for the global climate”.
It’s been used to describe the area an asteroid could wipe out if it hit the Earth, and how much damage a nuclear bomb could cause.
A Swansea University (SU) Professor said about a huge iceberg: “The giant block is estimated to cover an area of roughly 6,000 sq km; that’s about a quarter the size of Wales”.
The first time it appeared in print was for a book called Elementary Geography in the Nelsons’ School Series, published in 1863.
In it the author, Thomas G. Dick, compared parts of the British Empire with the component regions of the United Kingdom.
So New Zealand is described as the “Size of Great Britain and Ireland“; New Brunswick “Nearly the size of Scotland”; and the Falkland Islands as “Nearly the size of Wales”.
The same method was employed by Robert Anderson in his book published the following year.
It was featured in The Times on November 23, 1877 to describe an application to make Yellowstone a National Park in the US.
The annoying phrase did not appear again in the newspaper until more than seven years later when another correspondent used it in reference to Montenegró.
The writer declared: “Yellowstone Park is a region about one-half the size of Wales”.
You would like to think the days were numbered for this lazy cliché.
After all, in Australia they use the “size of Sydney Harbour”, in Denmark “the size of Fyn” (one of the islands); in the US they choose a state.
It appears, however, to be making a resurgence today.
Just as well I have never used it to give sizes – others will, though, when people can’t be bothered to do a bit of work…
The memories of Phil’s decades long award-winning career in journalism (when effort was made to give accurate sizes) as he was gripped by the incurable neurological condition, Hereditary Spastic Paraplegia (HSP), have been released in a major book ‘A GOOD STORY’. Order it now!
Publication of another book, however, was refused, because it was to have included names.
Tomorrow – ‘Sorry is still the hardest word, part three’ where Phil looks at how a proper apology for a mistake is almost NEVER made, and more evidence today underlines this salient fact.
