The Intelligent Quarterly from the publishers of The Insurance Insider

Winter 2011 / 2012

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Dear friend,

We journalists are the scourge of English teachers across the globe.

Like marauding barbarians we routinely mangle the raw material that so delights and fascinates the curators of our linguistic treasures.

Nothing is sacred. We regularly overpower the imperial guards and storm the syntactic and grammatical citadels only to defile the sancta that lie within, leaving a smouldering trail of mixed metaphors, clichés and split infinitives in our wake.

Insider Publishing is as guilty as any of its peers. Like second rate scribes knocking off serialised sub-Tolkien fantasy, we bring you so many industry "behemoths", reinsurance "giants" and underwriting "titans", that surely trolls, goblins and orcs cannot be lurking far away?

I can hear my former English masters groaning in unison as they prepare to take aim with their chalk dusters and flex their dreaded meter rulers.

One wonders what they would make of our latest offering?

Such has been the frequency and severity of global catastrophic activity since the Chilean earthquake of 18 months ago that the Insider journalists' communal linguistic palate has been struggling to reach for a new catch-all term to match it.

As is so often the case, the new phrase emerged so organically that it is hard to pinpoint when it was born, still less exactly to whom its authorship should be attributed.

The verbal label to which I refer is of course, "brutal roll-call of catastrophes", a construct which will have been repeated so often in our publications in 2011 that it will have become familiar to even our most casual of readers.

As true radicals we should be justifiably proud of our linguistic achievement. Like the eponymous Gremlins in the 1980s movie, the little devil we have fathered has multiplied manyfold and is proliferating across the earth like a monstrous virus, wreaking textual destruction in its path.

Granted - a "brutal roll-call" is probably putting things the wrong way round.

Even in the strictest and most puritanical educational establishments, or the French Foreign legion for that matter, there rarely exists a roll-call that can be described as "brutal". Upon reflection we are prepared to admit that the reading of the register of catastrophes should have been phrased as a "roll-call of brutal cats".

But perhaps we shouldn't be so hard upon ourselves? As vanguardists, we are at the linguistic coalface. After all, since it is our job to find out news, the logic follows that we must often be the first to discover new phenomena.

Discovering new phenomena is wonderful, and is something that we at Insider Publishing pride ourselves as achieving more than most. But it does present language challenges.

The first to discover something becomes the first to name it, but the pioneer suffers the pressure of coming up with a decent moniker.

The just-in-time reinsurance capital buzzword of late 2005 is a case in point. Legend has it that a journalist at this organisation misheard one of the original conversations at which this expression was first minted.

How might history have changed if Cyrus, Sirocco and Flatiron and their cousins had been collectively dubbed sidebars as opposed to sidecars?

But enough of such fancy.

This letter is a roundabout way of saying that 2011's "brutal roll-call of cats", or as you may wish, "the roll-call of brutal cats", is an unprecedented occurrence that has stretched our vocabularies as far as it has our imaginations.

We shall wager that when the tallying is over, 2011's gremlins will have also stretched our industry to its limits.

How does one describe the worst cat year ever? What is a collective noun for cats? Words sometimes fail us.

We just hope that this time markets don't fail us too.

Mark Geoghegan

Editor