HOW ARE WE GOING to get rid of weapons of mass destruction? No, let me rewrite that, before I bore my loyal readers (all three of you) into the first known instance of synchronised rigor mortis in the annals of human suffering. What I mean is: how are we going to get rid of the expression “weapons of mass destruction”.

It’s an urgent matter. They should pass a UN resolution about it. An American academic claims that the “WMD” phrase was uttered 2,000 times in White House briefings last year, and there are days when our own Prime Minister seems to exceed that total before breakfast. Turn on the radio any morning and you find WMDs jammed bumper to bumper. The American Dialect Society has chosen the phrase as its “word of the year” (“word”, it seems, being somewhat loosely defined in American dialect). And WMD also tops Lake Superior University’s celebrated list of phrases that should be banished for “misuse, overuse and general uselessness”.

It isn’t new. Etymologists say that it dates back to the 1940s. But since Bush and Blair elevated the Bounder of Baghdad to the status of World’s Most Dangerous Dictator (or, rather confusingly, WMDD) the WMD incantation has become the cliché on every politician’s lips.

You don’t have to be George Orwell to work out why. Like all the best political euphemisms, it is vague enough to cover anything that the speaker wishes it to mean at any time in the future. As military experts point out, there is only one true weapon of mass destruction: the nuclear bomb. Chemical and biological weapons may be vile, but they don’t destroy whole cities and their populations. Yet by including them in the catch-all WMD phrase, our leaders are much more likely to find a reason to go to war.

Indeed, some of them define WMD even more loosely. When Robin Cook was Foreign Secretary he said that “the self-loading rifle has become the modern weapon of mass destruction”. By that criterion, every dictator in the world has WMDs by the thousand. We should know. They bought most of them from us.

Of course, WMD is not the only irritating political cliché bandied around at present. Others include the melodramatic “smoking gun”, which rather implies that the Iraq problem is an episode of Midsomer Murders, and the pompous “material breach” (though I do like the sound of “Once more unto the material breach, dear friends, once more”). Then there’s “axis of evil” (ie, anyone who gets in our way), and “regime change” — two innocuous little words that seem to mean invading a country, slaughtering its ruling hierarchy and army and imposing a government of our choosing. And when the war starts we will doubtless be welcoming back “friendly fire” (killing your own soldiers or civilians in error), “collateral damage” (ditto), “surgical strike” (ditto), “precision bombing” (ditto) and “smart weapon” (ditto).

Well, perhaps such euphemisms are inevitable in wartime. But we haven’t reached that state yet. May I implore our leaders, and the journalists who cover these matters, to give the glib WMD phrase a long, long holiday? It’s overused, overwrought and, worst of all, over here. Surely it isn’t beyond the combined wit of the geniuses in the White House and 10 Downing Street to think up a fresher cliché that disguises their real intentions just as effectively.

OF COURSE, politicians aren’t the only ones guilty of talking in clichés. Most of us do it. I have just spent a happy hour on clichesite.com, a website that pulls together thousands of the world’s tawdriest clichés. God, what a list! It includes nearly every phrase guaranteed to set my teeth gnashing: “the jury’s still out on that”, “wake up and smell the carfeee”, “emotional roller-coaster” (how histrionic can a fairground ride be?), “bad hair day”, “shoes to die for”, “in the wake of September 11”, “get a life”, “the ball’s in your court” (what sort of game requires the players to stand in different courts?) and, also pinched from sport, “a level playing field”, which is presumably one on which nobody has “moved the goalposts”.

Am I, too, guilty of using clichés? Oh, come on! Is the Pope Catholic? Or, as the American variant listed by clichesite.com puts it: “Does the Pope wear a funny hat?” (which is rich, coming from the country that invented the baseball cap). But at least I can now pepper my discourse with striking foreign phrases. How about “there is no cow on the ice”, which is said to be Sweden’s favourite cliché? (Something lost in translation, I fear.) Or, from rural America: “I’m as horny as a three-peckered billy goat”. Try whispering that to your partner over the Ovaltine tonight. You never know. You might find yourself clinging to that emotional roller-coaster.

FINALLY, a reader begs to differ. Well, he doesn’t exactly beg. “You were wrong last week to chastise London Underground for offering more expensive journeys than Concorde,” writes Jeremy Eastwood. “It’s true that, at £1.23, the cost of travelling a mile on Concorde is less than the cost of a £1.60 single-zone Tube ticket. But the latter is valid for several miles. A better target for your ‘satire’ (ooh! I don’t like the tone of those quotation marks, Mr Eastwood) would be the £42 first-class return on the Heathrow Express: an outrageous £1.40 per mile.”

Outrageous indeed. But here’s a question to exercise superior minds such as Mr Eastwood’s. Pound for mile, and excluding military jets and spacecraft, what is the most expensive mode of transport in the world today? Let me set the ball rolling. When Cunard launches its new Queen Mary next January the top-price ticket for a transatlantic crossing will be £19,369, or about £5.60 a mile. I reckon that goes straight to the top of the Cor Blimey League. But someone, somewhere, will have devised an even pricier way of moving mugs from A to B. Suggestions?

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