The issue issue is the issue at issue

There was a time when English was young that the word issue shared the stage comfortably with now forgotten terms like subject, topic, question, debate and discussion.

Now, like a vigorous weed, issue has replaced them all and has even risen to the dizzy heights of being the only word which any journalist worth his salt is happy to use more than once or even more than twice in the same sentence. In my days as a reporter, the repetition of a substantive word in a whole story was frowned upon, let alone multiple occurrences within one paragraph.

And the problem certainly cannot be that it has been an under-used word now rightly tripping backwards into the limelight: according to Collins dictionary, it has no less than 27 meanings, not counting all the newcomers now incoprorated into meanings numbers 8, 9 and 12. It's not inappropriate that meaning number 11 is a "suppurating sore or a discharge from a wound".

The rot seems to have set in when our do-gooding friends, professional and voluntary, decided that no-one is allowed to have or be a problem any more. People no longer have problems; they have issues. I have no problem with that, except that one day (Lord, make it soon!) someone will decide that issue has all the connotations that problem once had and must be replaced by a less sensitive word. The trouble is that now that issue has been expanded to connote all these other things, it will never be replaced because it is vague enough to be meaningless and therefore harmless. Having an issue will no longer be a problem because no-one will know what it is. It could be anything from a mild disagreement (with a neighbour or partner perhaps?) to a major social or physical disability.

So I seem to have talked myself into the regrettable conclusion that the word issue is now invincible as the word weed of the era. I will have to learn to live with it. But so long as I have breath in my body to aspirate, I will never stop taking issue with its over-use.