Cliche of the Week 118 – Bustling

The world is obsessed with bustling. Cities are always like that, hotels do it, crowds mostly do it when they are not rioting, shopping districts are lucky if they are and train stations don’t need a sign saying they are busy.

This description of energetic and hurried action appears in about 2000 mainstream news reports each month.

“About 30 miles away, in the loft-style office of Action AIDS in Philadelphia’s bustling Chinatown section.” (The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 19)

“After days of incessant rocket fire, the largest city in southern Israel has been turned into a ghost town. Schools are closed, stores are shuttered and normally bustling streets are empty.” (The Globe and Mail, November 19)

“The village hall was bustling with conversation.” (East Anglian Daily Times, November 19)

“Nearly three weeks after Sandy came ashore on the New Jersey coast, some of the beach towns that made this area famous remain largely empty and dark, shells of their bustling summer selves.” (The Wall Street Journal, November 19)

Sandy again: “In a usually bustling retail plaza, windows of shuttered shops were grimy, with mannequins in winter coats tipped over and stacked like corpses.” (The Washington Post, November 12)

Cliché of the Week appears in The Australian newspaper Mondays. Chris Pash’s book, The Last Whale , a true story set in the 1970s about Australia’s last whaling station and the activists who fought to close it, was published by Fremantle Press in 2008.