Val Stevens wrote from Carnforth, Lancashire, to say she’s infuriated by the phrase “I can’t wait!”.
“I was brought up to believe that a sign of maturity was the ability to defer gratification. It was thought infantile to want everything NOW and that politeness lay in waiting patiently. Clearly that is now outmoded.”
Oh dear. Val’s main beef seems to be with television presenters, who are outside my bailiwick, but I thought I’d check to see if it had cropped up in The Times lately, just in case that explained why she’d written to Feedback. I found only one example. In his Notebook on Wednesday, Matthew Parris revealed that he was awaiting the delivery of a new bidet. “I can’t wait,” he wrote. “The excitement
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