Tipping point

As Paul Dickson and I point out in our introduction to “Journalese — A Dictionary for Deciphering the News,” where would we be without journalese? We have used journalese ourselves countless times in our years as journalists and writers. One example is “tipping point,” which I used recently in a piece in our excellent Boston neighborhood newsletter, NorthEndWaterfront.com. I wrote that the North End is nearing the tipping point when pedestrian and vehicular traffic turns into a solid gridlock because of jam-packed sidewalks and streets. (It would become a case memorialized by Yogi Berra’s classic: “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”) Well, the North End is in big-time company, as a headline in the Boston Globe, Dec. 31, 2016, points out: “Europe is at a tipping point.” Note that tipping points are rarely reached. Just as tensions never reach a climax but keep on escalating.