My Bill Bryson Moment, a Grumpy Old Pedant speaks

A recent BBC News article contained the phrase: "Lahore is now the epicentre of a struggle ..."

A superficial scan of online dictionary definitions confirms and supports my opinion that "epicentre" means "The point of the earth's surface directly above the focus of an earthquake".

This demonstrates the regrettable tendency for a longer and inaccurate word to be used where a shorter word does the job perfectly well. I overheard someone say "Please interpolate these results for me" when he should have said "Please interpret these results". "Interpolate" has an extra syllable and the pompous twit who used it was trying to make himself sound more important by using a longer word. Unfortunately the word "Interpolate", while it has to do with the interpretation of data, does not mean the interpretation of data. It means the prediction or estimation of a value by using known values of the data which lie to either side of the predicted or estimated value. For example if the weather report told me that the temperature in Birmingham yesterday was eighteen degrees and in Nottingham was twenty degrees I could interpolate that the temperature in Ashby-de-la-Zouche was nineteen degrees. Since Ashby-de-la-Zouche lies halfway between Birmingham and Nottingham it is reasonable to expect that the temperature there lies halfway between the temperatures for those two cities.

Misusing "epicentre" where "centre" does the job is a crime of similar magnitude. I guess the correspondent might be trying to say that a widespread undercurrent of dissent has flared up in an outbreak of violent attacks in Lahore, but why not say that instead of trying to create a geological metaphor? Confusingly the correspondent goes on to quote a source as saying "Lahore is the only city in Pakistan which has remained relatively peaceful" so far from being the centre or focus of violence, it seems the city is an island of stability so a comparison with a seismic disturbance confuses me.

If we're going to enlist expressions from fields such as geology I will allow an "avalanche of support" or a "landslide victory" since these suggest a massive, fast moving and overwhelming weight of whatever we are talking about. Unlike some pedants, I will allow that our language is evolving [1] and enriching our lives but if words like "interpolate" and "epicentre" are allowed to lose their precision and accuracy through the misuse I have quoted above, then we will all be poorer for it.

[1] And in the sense of evolutionary biology, words and phrases are being eliminated from our speech by a process of natural selection. Those which are weak or useless are not being passed on to the next generation. Those which are strong and useful are being preserved through constant use. We are constantly experimenting with new forms and making them work for us, or discarding them