Before I start this column, a word of advice for the sevvies reading this. The worst phrase you can ever use, ever, is ‘oh, it’ll be fine.’ I admit that I use this phrase on a regular basis, usually a dozen times a day about everything from homework to chores to the faint smell of gas, but it has a tendency to backfire. Ever had the sudden sinking feeling associated with missing homework, pocket money, or science labs? Chances are The-Phrase-That-Must-Not-Be-Said is at fault. One man who should know about this is George Papandreou, the Prime Minister of Greece. In case you haven’t heard yet, Greece has been in some trouble for a while; the sort of trouble that involves riot police and mass protests by people wearing cardboard cut-outs of politicians and waving hand-painted signs.


The reasons for this are, in my opinion, quite simple. While some economists have been forgetting to take their medication and are raving on about sovereign debt and credit ratings and bond yield spreads and other arcane concepts, my explanation is simpler. George just looked at his pile of paperwork and dismissively told his secretary ‘Oh, ignore it. It’ll be fine. Now where’s that cup of coffee?’ You can imagine it. Massive debt? It’ll go away. International financial crisis crippling your largest industries? The next guy can sort it out. A freefalling economy? They exaggerated it. And so on until poor old George gets that sudden sinking feeling associated with a missing economy, and is forced to ask if the other countries happen to have a spare € 110 billion that he can borrow to buy another one.

But where did this phrase come from, do I hear you ask? Actually, I didn’t, but I needed to say that in order to continue the column. The phrase, as some brief research will tell you, has a rich and varied history. Fossils have been found in ancient Egyptian tombs believed to be of it’s direct evolutionary ancestors have been found, the translation being ‘He who bothers not Anubis faces not the million pits of fire’. Alright, it might have lost a bit in the translation, but you get the idea. It was carried on for thousands of years of civilisation, passed from procrastinator to procrastinator, until it re-emerged in popular culture in Britain during WWII in the phrase ‘Keep calm and carry on’. Spread around the city by the government on propaganda posters, it urged the good citizens of London to ignore what was going on around them and hope that if they left the Germans to themselves they would go away. It was exported to the colonies on the prison ships, where it underwent a rapid mutation into ‘she’ll be right’; and again when internet was formed into CBF (Can’t Be Fruitloopudgitunced). However, this variation of the phrase is still not in wide usage, and the more popular form that this article is about still has the upper hand.

And so we have the history of The Phrase. Terror of schoolchildren and politicians alike, scientists around the globe are working as we speak- well, as you read- to find a cure, or at least a vaccination, for it. Until recently, the majority of the population was protected by their counter-phrase ‘A stitch in time saves nine’, but the general population has become desensitised to it for several reasons; mainly a combination of over-usage and the realisation that it makes practically no sense whatsoever. The emergence of various internet-based factors such as Facebook and MLIA that have increased susceptibility to IWBF have not helped the situation, and in some areas the mortality rate has reached 3% of all deaths, and growing fast. The WHO is considering announcing it a pandemic, and many nations are already installing phrase warning sirens in all towns or cities with a population over 2000.

-If you have survived reading this article, and remianed un-distracted, kudos to you my friend.
eric M