Remember the “roadmap for peace“? The decade-old effort to find a resolution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was largely ill-fated, but it bore at least one discernible fruit: all of a sudden just about everything was called a “road map”. There were no plans, or schemes, or programme, or blueprints. It was road maps for everything.
It hasn’t quite reached that saturation yet, but a similar thing seems under way today, this time with the fiscal cliff. As this BBC News Magazine piece explains, the term has been in use in the US for a few years, but this year it has installed itself unavoidably in the popular lexicon.
The US has apparently avoided plummetting from said cliff with an eleventh-hour agreement, but – ta-da – everyone seems to have one of their own.
A quick Google search reveals that the following are now boasting of their “own fiscal cliff”:
Britain (already fallen from).
US states including Illinois, Florida. Washington, Maine.
US cities including Sarasota, Cincinnati, Rialto, Los Angeles.
Education in the US state of Arizona.
Education in the US state of Philadelphia.
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