The issue with issues

But Mr. B.’s analysis is more puzzling than his failure to check the facts. For him, the advance of issues is part of an Orwellian plot to solve our “problems” by simply eliminating the word. “This, of course, is a product of the ‘no problem’ culture in which all difficulties depend on one’s point of view, and are open to debate,” he explains. “The word ‘problem’ is politically incorrect.”

This baffled me for a moment - I couldn’t recall anyone calling problem a demeaning or insensitive word - but then I realized that Mr. B. must think “politically incorrect” is a synonym for “euphemism.” In his view, when we use the word issues we are failing to face up to our problems, and there goes civilization as we know it.

(Of course, Mr. B. is probably one of those people who protest loudly when a clerk or waiter answers a request with “no problem,” as if there’s something inherently rude about the phrase. Yes, that peeve has made its way across the pond.)

It’s true that one use of the word issues is a recent invention. But it’s not here by mandate from Big Brother. In fact, if you have an issue with your neighbor - a dispute over a fence, say - you’re using a word that began as a 14th-century legal term (as in “issue of fact”). The meaning broadened over time, says the Oxford English Dictionary, to mean “matter in contention” and then a matter involving important consequences. Our modern political issues shows up in an 1898 citation from the Westminster Gazette: “In the absence of issues politics become a question of self-interest.”