Jonesieblog

[I came across this draft post today - I wrote it back in April.  Time to set it free!]

Am I the only person in the world that finds the sentence “We had a discussion around this issue” incredibly annoying, when the writer means that they had a discussion about the issue?

“About” here means “on the subject of” as in “what is this book about?” “About” shares a different meaning with “around” – bodies could be scattered about the battlefield as well as around it. But this does not mean that I could ask “what is this book around?” and it therefore seems nonsensical to say that I am having a discussion around a topic, unless I am genuinely discussing a range of issues which sit around the topic at hand in some sense.

Stumble it!