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The mechanical kick-start got a motorcycle engine going. Yet the metaphor now often sounds as though it meant ‘push-start’, or ‘start a motor-vehicle by sending it downhill’. Kick-start just sounds more dynamic than push-start.
Everyone is at it. In early September we read about David Cameron urging his new Cabinet ‘to focus relentlessly on kick-starting Britain’s economic recovery’. On 29 September Ed Balls advocated a stamp-duty holiday to kick-start the economy. Two days later, he said that revenue from the fourth generation of mobile phones would kick-start the economy. A week after that, Liam Fox said he believed that abolition of capital gains tax would kick-start the economy. By the middle of October, Mr Cameron was saying that planning reforms were necessary ‘not just to kick-start the economy’. At the same time, the Free Enterprise Group urged George Osborne to adopt its policies to kick-start the economy. The notion had grown so universal that an innocent florist told the Mail on Sunday: ‘I know we must spend to kick-start the economy.’
I wrote about kicking in last year, and its fashionable cousin kick off (in the sense of ‘go critical’). I also hear from associates of Veronica’s in media and policy-wonk circles of public figures being given a kicking, meaning ‘publicly criticised’. Sometimes this edges into being briefed against, i.e. being subjected to backbiting and lies from one’s colleagues.
We are not the first to get our kicks from kicking. In the anonymous A New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew (1699) is found the unexplained term: ‘A high Kick, the top of the Fashion.’ But the canting crew of today scarcely notice their own cant.
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