Is the argument over the word ‘staycation’ just pedantry or does it matter? Pic © istockphoto.com

I’ve only once had a proper summer staycation, thirteen years ago. I know that timing exactly as the Prof was heavily pregnant with our third child, a heatwave hit, and suddenly the thought of a long drive to stay in an old windmill in Norfolk felt like taking the One Ring to the Cracks of Doom in Mordor. So we kept our out-of-office notices on and had a lazy summer holiday in our house as if we were somewhere else. I really enjoyed it.

I’m one of those people who visibly winces when people use ‘staycation’ to mean ‘holidaying in the UK’. I mean, what the actual… First of all the word ‘stay’ clearly means stay, as opposed to going anywhere. But from an environmental point of view, it normalises the idea that you have to travel abroad to have a holiday, and for most people that means flying.

I’m not evangelical against flying, but for citizens it is the cheapest way to contribute to climate change so it can wipe out any carbon reductions elsewhere. For example, if you sold your car and started commuting by bike, then if you spend the subsequent savings on flights for a cheeky weekend city break, you might as well not have bothered (this is known as the rebound effect).

But more importantly, language matters. Calling a UK holiday a ‘staycation’ rather than a ‘holiday’, makes it sound like some kind of sackcloth oddity. Back in his husky-hugging days before he became Prime Minister, David Cameron flirted with a frequent flying tax – you got one flight per annum tax-free, after that you had to pay. This made complete sense, but was hastily withdrawn after the press started claiming it would impact ‘ordinary people’, a phrase of highly malleable meaning.

According to various statistics, around half the UK population doesn’t fly at all in any one year. The other half average 1.26 flights – heavily skewed towards the 10% of the population who took half of all international flights. In other words, the tax would have only hit a small minority of people with very high carbon lifestyles – hardly ‘ordinary people’ (but very likely to include newspaper editors and columnists…) The frequent flyer tax is a great, progressive idea, but it will be weaponised against anyone proposing it – “they’re coming for your holidays” will beat statistics in the public debate any day of the week. Have your tin hat ready.

Language was the first area where I started developing the idea of Green Jujitsu. When I had Emma Burlow on the pod, we discussed Industrial Symbiosis where one industry’s waste becomes raw material for another. The first workshop I ran for the Tees Valley Industrial Symbiosis Project made slow progress until I jokingly banned the word ‘waste’ – this became a hard and fast rule as the participants took the prejudice of the label ‘waste’ off the materials and started seeing them as resources. That led to my maxim ‘waste is a verb, not a noun’.

As any politician knows, words matter. The best slogans can determine whether a policy lives or dies. “The Polluter Pays” is not only a great principle, but one expressed so succinctly in a way it is hard to argue with (and the one David Cameron should have used back in the day and stuck to his guns). As for me, my summer holidays this year will be half-staycation (a genuine one), half-camping in Northumberland (not a staycation).