Over the weekend, whilst doing a bit of editing for my brother, I came across a lesson on the use of the imperfect in Spanish, you know, I used to go to the cinema every day; when I was a child we used to go the country every summer etc. As is usual with the unstructured mind, I began to wonder how to say the most unlikely sentences in Spanish, the one that gripped me most being: I used to live in a world before everyone started using the word sustainable. Yo vivía en un mundo ante se empezó usando la palabra sostenible. or, is – Yo solía vivir en un mundo ante se empezó utilizando la palabra sostenible – the better bet. I rather like utilizar in this context and soler seems to carry more of the weight of my depression over the over-use of this word. Any suggestions for the correct translation, which best conveys the meaning, gratefully received.

I thought for most of the last decade that I was alone in hating the sound of this word. It appeared everywhere, from government directives, to bids to local authorities for grants and any other trivial bit of bureaucray in between. One evening, chatting to a friend in Almería on Skype , I discovered that he had a similar loathing of the word in Spanish. The word in its various linguistic variations was slowly taking over the whole of the EEC decision making machinery. Sustainable or sostenible was the buzz word of various centrist, leftish governments who were trying desperately to appear in control of a rapidly over heating economy.

¿Crisis? ¿Qué crisis?

It was a salulatory lesson to see both Zapatero and Gordon Brown struggling to hide the enormity of the problem from their respective electorates, and with the electorates in Spain and the UK being reasonably sophisticated, surprising, as neither was being blamed for causing the crisis. One of my favourite quotes from the decade was the Queen innocently asking unsuspecting treasury officials at a reception “Surely one of you saw it coming?”

All the world seemed to be aware that the banking world was pursuing unsustainable policies and that a credit ridden system, lending to anyone, regardless of their ability to repay loans, was bound to end in a massive implosion. The only sustainable entity in the first decade of the 21st century turned out to be banker’s bonuses. So here’s hoping that the word sustainable or sostenible or any variation lies hidden for the next decade, and is replaced by common-sense.