You have won the (postcode) lottery

Every so often a word or phrase worms its way into the national consciousness.

Newspaper journalists are not immune to this phenomenon, and indeed probably end up using stock phrases more than most people as a quick shorthand way of making a point.

One of my current favourites is "postcode lottery", a phrase that people use to describe pretty much any situation where one part of the country does things differently to somewhere else.

There is a postcode lottery, according to today's Journal, for example, in the provision of public transport in the countryside - "Fresh pleas for rural bus funding".

A quick check of The Journal's archives shows that the phrase has also turned up in stories about cancer treatment, IVF and even planning in the last few months.

And the fact is that there is, of course, a postcode lottery about a lot of things. Otherwise everything would be the same throughout the country and then people would complain that the authorities were relying on a "one size fits all" approach (another phrase that is slowly taking over the world.)

My personal favourite buzz-phrase of the moment is "not fit for purpose". Ever since John Reid used those words to describe the Home Office, chief executives everywhere have been falling over themselves to use it to describe their organisations. It's as if there is some mad competition between the bosses of the world to say how terrible they are.

Last year I interviewed the new principal of Northumberland College and started our interview with the not particularly Paxman-like probe: "So, how are things going?"

Her answer was that the college was "not fit for purpose" and, of course, the story ended up on the front page of the paper the next day - "College not fit for purpose - its boss".

No sooner had the paper hit the newsstands but I got a call from the furious head of the college's PR company saying that the story wasn't fair. As we argued, he admitted that I hadn't misquoted his client, but said that she had said lots of nice things about people after her initial criticism.

But here's the thing: if you arrive at an organisation and declare it "not fit for purpose", two things are going to happen. For one thing, you will upset everyone who works for you and secondly, you will end up on the front of the local paper, no matter how many nice things you say afterwards.

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