Stuart Wolfendale

If English is your second language, you may not be familiar with the expression, “to coin a phrase’. It means to come up with a phrase or expression, which becomes so popular that it enters into common use like a new coin enters into circulation. Contemporary phrase-coiners do not seem to know very much about history or geography. Given the standards or total absence of education in those subjects in English speaking countries, this should not but surprising bit it is annoying.

 

Take the eager melodramatist who came up with ‘financial tsunami’. How did this person’s mind’s eye connect large scale fraud leading to a drying up of credit with a massive undersea earthquake creating a tidal waved which burst over the land and was hugely, horridly wet?

 

Probably they rifled through their mental card index of bad stuff they’d heard about on the media and up popped the 2004 South Pacific tsunami which is pretty much the worst of it. It does go to show how confused and blunted nerves ends tuned to media markings can become when a phrase to describe job loss and bankruptcy can be borrowed from a quarter of a million recently dead.

 

It can’t all be blamed on the TV. There is precious little talk on TV or in chat rooms these days about tsars. Yet now, probably by grace of a newspaper sub editor flicking through his catalogue of ‘Tired Terms You Can Trust’, Hong Kong has a ‘tree tsar’.

 

I am not going into the rather sad reasons which led to Chief Secretary, Henry Tang being appointed to lead a committee, suddenly created by what must rate as one of the sharpest knee-jerks of all time, to watch over  of Hong Kong’s old trees. That was done very thoughtfully, wryly and damningly by Tim Hamlett in the South China Morning Post just before Easter.

 

It was actually in ‘The Post’ that I first saw the description, ‘tree tsar’ and it took me back a bit but not far. General Brent Snowcroft had been America’s ‘drugs tsar’ at a point in the Clinton Aministration, which was an ironic way of describing his role and happily circulated by the dumb White House.

 

Tsars were the monarchs of Russia who ruled there until 1917. The word has no other normal usage. Occasionally these tsars were effective and intelligent. More frequently they were hopelessly incompetent, intellectually puerile or ruthless to the point of sadism and nearly all had the moral instincts of a heavily armed hyena.

 

If a Russian tsar had any association with drugs, he would have run them in a way that made the Gulf Cartel stand up and cry . “Aw, come on now, that’s going a bit far!”

 

Attracting the attention of some tsars was a bit like getting one of  Signoury Weavers ‘Aliens’ to look over your way but if done safely and you directed it to trees, its anybody’s guess what a tsar would have done . Hang people from them is an intelligent one to start with. I am going to bet that he would have cut them down. There does not need to have been much of a reason. It would just have appealed.

 

Perhaps the weary sub editor or other glib phrase coiner got close to the truth about Hong Kong. So often, when this oddly anemic administration does a land deal with a developer -Hong Kong’s old and disreputable nobility, perhaps - the developer will chop down some trees. The common people have come to like and appreciate their trees. Various scholars tell them that they need them but the buzz of the saw and the crack of the trunk have always been the sound of profit. For the sake of lines of cookie-cutter houses, they still get chopped down.

 

I’m sure Mr.Tang does not want to be known as a tsar. If he is to spend ridiculous amounts of time tootling around , tapping at old trees, he should take on a title of Oliver Cromwell, hardly a pussy cat himself, who overthrew a king for principles and  was called ‘the Lord Protector”. As a coined phrase, ‘tree lord protector’ won’t get far  but, taken to heart, it would do wonders for the trees.

Posted in All, environment