Words at W ork

situation makes a point forcefully. We think o f card games. We know

that a player may recognize that he has in his hands a selection of cards
likely to bring him victory. The image is useful because while the favoured
player recognizes his good luck, the other players cannot see w hat he has
in his hand. But we hear this from a speaker explaining w hy he chose to
accept a certain post:
The attractions of the job had the winning hand.
This is to waste a useful image in a context w here half its meaning is lost.
It is no m ore appropriate than to explain o n es choice on the m enu by
saying The attractions o f the profiterole had the w inning hand.

Some O th er Overdone Expressions

We have looked at a handful of established metaphorical expressions
w hich readily come to m ind w hen we are speaking or writing. It is now
w orth adding a few usages w hich have no metaphorical content but
w hich are often misapplied.
no exception
An error o f misuse w hich regularly occurs in the press and on the radio
is represented by statements ending w ith the expression no exception.
The proper use o f these w ords requires some generalization to be made
(Englishmen like their roast beef on Sundays, and John Smith is no
exception). Too often there is no appropriate generalization to w hich
the expression may be appended.
Cricket statisticians are oft-times a breed apart and Anandji Dossa is no
exception.
Here there is no generalization to which an exception could be made.
The statement is that cricket statisticians are oft-tim es a breed apart.
This implies that they are not in all cases a breed apart. Therefore the
question of an individual statistician being an exception cannot arise. If
the w riter had said All cricket statisticians are a breed apart then it w ould
have been reasonable to point out that Dossa was no exception to this
generalization. Yet one can find worse misuses o f the exception than that
one. Here is an advertisement: