‘As the door turneth upon his hinges,’ says the Book of Proverbs, ‘so doth the slothful upon his bed.’ But today nothing turns, neither the door, nor the slothful, nor his ox, nor his ass. It pivots.
I read in the paper that Meg O’Neill, the new CEO of BP is ‘expected to double-down on the pivot back towards oil and gas’. Doubling down on a pivot must take some gymnastic skill.
Saudi Arabia meanwhile is trying out a new snooker shot: ‘to pivot away from less lucrative projects’ – such as snooker. Here the writer might as well have said ‘turn away’, as in the Bible. Pivot has the restrictive extra sense of remaining in one place as you turn.
We English borrowed the noun pivot from the French in the 14th century, and they used it to mean ‘hinge’. There is a mention of pivot-shears in a will made in York in 1398 in rather charming Latin, listing ‘necessaria shopæ meæ pertinencia, videlicet … i holdepanne… skipscales, ii par de pevet-sheres’.
A pivot has been used happily in the figurative sense of a hinge or turning point for a couple of centuries. Recently it has become fashionable as a description of a swivel from one principle to its opposite – as though that were a morally neutral operation. Labour has been wondering whether it can shake off its net zero policy, like a locust.
I think pivot might share something of the meaning of the German Zeitenwende, ‘a turning-point in time’. Olaf Scholz when chancellor of Germany made a speech on 27 February 2022 declaring a Zeitenwende in German policy in response to the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
When I looked up Zeitenwende in an online dictionary, I found the phrase vor der Zeitenwende translated as ‘before the year 0, before Christ, before the Common Era’. The lexicographer seemed unaware that, in the great pivot from Before Christ to Anno Domini, there was no Year Zero: 1 bc was directly followed by ad 1.
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