On 23 January 2013, the Daily Mail described Cameron’s much-delayed speech ON
"Europe" that day as an “historic ultimatum”.
Cameron indeed proposed that Britain’s membership of the European Union should
be re-negotiated, to be followed by what he called an “in-out referendum” on
whether the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland should stay or
leave.
Oxonian Griceian wits *immediately* dubbed it the hokey-cokey referendum
(Americans will prefer hokey-pokey), with one headline reading “In-out, that’s
not what it’s all about”.
Cameron's speech has pushed the neologism
i. Brexit
a portmanteau, as Oxonian C. L. Dodgson would have it -- Grice loved Christ
Church -- for the Hareian (after R. M. Hare) imperative,
ii. British exit
to the foreground.
Strictly, of course, it’s the United Kingdom that would be leaving, but
iii. Ukexit would, to an Oxonian Griceian be thought as too clunky to be
acceptable, even implicaturally, as a portmanteau for
iv. UK exit.
In fact, Brexit, and its attending implicatures of this sort of Kantian
categorical imperative, began to appear in the British press at the start of
2012:
"The Prime Minister indulges loose talk, if we have to use Grice's term, of a
renegotiated relationship with a jittery, distracted Europe, if we have to use
this concept, which could spiral into a risky in/out referendum. No wonder
Ukip’s Nigel Farage hopes for a breakthrough or that Brussels has a new word:
“Brexit”".
Thus wrote someone working for The Guardian on 1 Jan. 2012.
UKIP, said as u-kip, is, of course, the UK Independence Party, with the
attending implicature of "independence from the EU," rather than, say, the
globe. If x gets independent FROM Europe, the entailment (but not implicature)
is that x IS at some point PART (if not parcel -- Grice always found this combo
"otiose") of Europe.
As it happens with most Griceianisms, "Brexit" appeared often enough during
2012 to be noticed in passing in a couple of Words of the Year compilations.
But it was overshadowed by the term it was modelled on:
v. Grexit
i.e. the possibility that Greece (of all countries) would leave the euro
currency zone.
The Griceian visibility of "Brexit" grew hugely following Cameron’s speech,
not only in Oxford, but also in Rome, and environs (including Vienna).
Thus, an Austrian publication commented sadly on the day of the Prime
Minister's speech:
vi. Und jetzt droht eine lange Brexit-Debatte.
In Austrian, it is polite to start a sentence with 'and':
vii. And now a long Brexit debate threatens.
Not far, a Czech publication one day after wrote:
viii. Odchod Británie z Evropské unie neboli „brexit“ by byl Griceiske
katastrofou.
Roughly,
ix. Britain leaving the European Union, or “Brexit”, would be a Griceian
disaster.
Such widespread popularity in Europe suggests that The Guardian was right to
attribute its invention to EU bureaucrats in Brussels -- perhaps an English one!
Cheers,
Speranza
