Why everyone is ‘struggling’

‘Quicksand!’ yelled my husband, flailing his arms wildly. Since he was sitting in his armchair, his dramatic representation of a scene from a western failed to convince, though it endangered the tumbler of whisky on the occasional table next to him.

He’d been set off (not that it takes much) by my mentioning the ubiquity of struggling. Instead of the hard-working families that we were forever being told about, it is now struggling families, torn between having another pie for tea or turning on the heating in these sweltering days.

Everyone is struggling. ‘Mateo Kovacic is struggling with knee problems,’ the Telegraph told me. Others are ‘struggling to care for dogs with health and behavioural problems’.

But there is a new kind of struggling, which seems to mean what you or I would call failing. The Sun had a sort of ‘spot the pigeon’ game in which the birds were scarcely visible on a ledge. ‘If you’re still struggling to find the two pigeons…’ the paper said, meaning ‘if you have failed’. Elsewhere I learnt that ‘Gareth Malone saw his MasterChef journey end after struggling to impress’, i.e. failing to impress.

The trouble is that failure doesn’t always imply struggle. ‘When patients are waiting more than 40 hours for an ambulance, it is clear the NHS is struggling to cope,’ the Mirror told us. But making an ambulance driver wait for hours to unload a patient to a hospital ward is a funny way of struggling.

Since it came into the language in Chaucer’s day, the main meaning of struggle has been ‘contend’ or ‘strive’ against some opposition. But in business management speak, struggling is a counterpart to challenges. Challenges are things you can’t or won’t do; struggling is failing to do them.

When the hangman Albert Pierrepoint became a pub landlord it was at the red-brick Help the Poor Struggler (now demolished) in a part of Oldham called Hollinwood. He had once begun a school essay: ‘When I leave school I should like to be the Official Executioner.’ His dream came true, and his uncle Thomas, a hangman too, advised him: ‘If you can’t do it without whisky, don’t do it at all.’ It certainly wouldn’t have suited my husband.