The chronic misuse of ‘dire’

‘Dire?’ said my husband. ‘It’s something chronic.’ He was putting on his idea of an Estuary accent, in a manner that might soon be unacceptable. But it is true that everything has been called dire lately, and that’s no small claim. ‘Dreadful, dismal, mournful, horrible, terrible, evil in a great degree,’ was the semantic landscape sketched for the word by Samuel Johnson in his Dictionary.

Johnson illustrated its usage by quoting Milton: ‘Hydras, and gorgons, and chimæras dire.’ As a matter of fact, in the first published edition of Paradise Lost, the line (Book II, line 628) is ‘Gorgons and Hydra’s, and Chimera’s dire’, with apostrophes that might put us in mind of a classical greengrocer. The printed text put words with foreign connections in italics, and spelling their plural was a problem at the time. Chimeras, for example was spelt Chimera’s in the printed editions of Ben Jonson’s Timbers in 1640 and in a work by John Arbuthnot, Pope’s friend, in 1712. But the convention couldn’t resist a general tidying by printers and publishers in the 19th century.

Enough about apostrophes, compelling as the subject is. My husband was suggesting that dire is misused in a similar way to chronic. In 1910 Wells had the hero of The History of Mr Polly excusing his tears by pretending a bad tooth had ‘made my eyes water something chronic’.

Chronic here sounds old-fashioned after a century or so. But dire, in the general sense of terrible, is in full vigour, especially in the sports pages. A match report in the Independent said: ‘Gomez was dire in the 7-2 defeat to Aston Villa.’

Dire full-stop, used as a predicate in this way, sounds dimmer than in attributive use. The Telegraph wrote recently of ‘the UK’s dire growth outlook’, of ‘Britain’s dire economic plight’, of its ‘dire economic fundamentals’. The Mail mentioned ‘a dire forecast of inflation jumping to 13.3 per cent’ and the Guardian spoke of ‘the dire straits the country finds itself in’. Other things that can be dire under the rules of cliché are a state, need or warning. The death of the Queen, though mournful, belongs to a different territory from events that are called dire.