Election-speak and clichés abound

The country has gone into election mode and soon people will be bombarded with the usual catchy electoral vocabulary.

COMMENT

By Syed Nadzri Syed Harun
The clichés are delightfully flowing thick and fast, now that we have moved into full-scale general election mode – on the radio, on TV, through e-mail, the social media, in newspapers and at ceramah.

Election-speak somehow suppresses the vocabulary a great deal and I am equally guilty for it as we wait for the Parliament to be dissolved “to pave the way for the long-anticipated election”.

Also “after months of intense speculation”, the nation goes to the polls for the 13th time and the glossary of hackneyed words and phrases we will come across over and over again in the next few weeks will inevitably include some of the following.

Home stretch: Interchangeable with final straight – this is perhaps one of the most abused and overused terms.

And it has become laughable that the “home stretch”, as used by certain quarters, has extended several miles too long to peg on the election date.

Giving their own interpretations, the smart alecs had first predicted March last year for polls, then when nothing happened they moved it to July, then November, then March this year and so on.

They have unwittingly put their credibility on the line. The Malays have a retort for this kind of thing: “Dah tawar dah”.

Loosely translated it means “it doesn’t matter anymore”. Then there’s coalition of the willing, a phrase adapted from the description of the invasion of Iraq by allied forces about 10 years ago. In the Malaysian context, it is basically used to get support to sow and spread hatred towards the ruling party.

Another popular word is reformasi as some people throw it around to demand reforms to a system they forever claim is corrupt. But of course, the question is whether there can be change for the better.

On the other side of the coin, the cliché in reply is transformasi. We come across the word very often – government transformation, economic transformation, and so on.

In addition, race-based is also amply adopted as the election is fought by parties seeking to promote the interests of particular race groups. By now, Malaysians have become too familiar with the tactic. Clean and fair is abundantly used in the run-up to the election because of the sheer power of the phrase.

But the more discriminating would like to ask what is actually not clean and not fair? And what could come out of the fight for a cleaner and fairer situation?

Battle-station strategy

There’s also frontline state. This has emerged after the last election as a battle-station strategy by certain political parties in this round. There appears to be several frontline states, the most obvious being Selangor.

The others that have cropped up along the way are Johor, Terengganu, Sabah, Perlis and Perak. At this rate, we might as well include all the others.

Closely related to the above is fixed deposit derived from the banking term to refer, in this case, to a crucible of seats not only certain to be won by a particular party but crucial to determining the overall outcome of the elections.

Sabah and Sarawak have for sometime been in this category for Barisan Nasional. Safe seat, on the other hand, adds another dimension to fixed deposit since it seems to be everywhere if you go by the bickering that’s persisting on both sides of the divide.

Every candidate wants to contest in the so-called “safe seat” and that is where the problem, and the squabbling, starts.

For BN, there’s one, for instance, in the Federal Territory, another in Perak and another in Selangor that are being fought over like crazy. And Perlis is divided. For the Pakatan Rakyat, we’ve lost track of how many.

It’s the reality of geopolitics. In the previous election, 54 of Pakatan’s 83 seats and 56 of BN’s 139 seats were won with a majority of less than 10%, hence they are called marginal seats. They can’t be safe.

With safe seat cynically comes the abused and overused winnable candidates.

Not only is this term grossly ambiguous, it is a misnomer because for the parties fielding their contenders, there’s really no such thing as a “lose-able” candidate, is there?

And winnable candidates are the subject of great disputes at the moment.

Which brings us to the battle-cry of ubah or tukar or change that is being chanted about.

For this, I shall pay tribute to guitar wizard Alvin Lee of British rock band Ten Years After (of Woodstock fame) who died last week.

He wrote a memorable song, “I’d love to change the world”, many years ago and this is a profound part of it. We can interpret it anyway we want.

I’d love to change the world But I don’t know what to do So I’ll leave it up to you.

Syed Nadzri is Redberry Group media adviser.