Just: a word that never fails to underplay the seriousness of any situation

There are already too few words beginning with ‘j’ in the English language to start rejecting any, but that doesn’t mean a few don’t stand out. “Jamboree” and “jacuzzi” are high up there on the list. “Jaunty” and “jingoistic” too. “Jamiroquai” might not even be a real word but it’s crying out for the ban hammer.

Jolly. Jezabelle. Jujutsu. Jumbo…

But more than any other word is the single-syllable monstrosity known as “just”. It’s a word which never fails to underplay the seriousness of any situation.

This thought might not reach Adrian Chiles‘s levels of metaphysical profundity (“Ever noticed how traffic islands are shaped like a pie?”, The Guardian, probably next week) but it did occur to me recently sitting in A&E at the local hospital up here outside Liverpool. A mother arrived with her teenage son who was cradling his arm after a BMX accident. When being checked in, he was insisting his injuries were “nothing” and he was eager to get back to his friends and his bike. His mother wasn’t for settling for any of that. “Why are you limping?” she asked.

“It’s m’knee,” he said. “It’s just a bit sore.”

With that, his mother dropped to the floor and rolled up his trouser leg to investigate the “just” knee.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” she screamed with the profound intensity you can only get in truly Catholic Scouse. “What the **** have you done to your ****ing knee?”

“It’s nothing,” he said. “It’s just…”

“It’s not just anything!” she screamed. “There’s a ****ing hole in it!”

“You what?”

“A hole! I’m ****ing looking right through it! I can see the wall!”

Sure enough, there was indeed a hole through the flesh of his knee that you could look through. She soon had nurses and doctors examining this hole. Even the receptionist (looking a little green in the process) got a sight of this unholy mess of a knee. She was right. There was nothing “just” about it. There rarely is.

“Just a flesh wound,” said the Black Knight after having had both his arms chopped off in Monty Python and the Holy Gail.

My late mother always used to offer the following observation towards the end of any football match where our family’s favourite team – sometimes England but mostly Liverpool – were losing. “They just need to score a couple of goals,” she’d say with unwavering optimism. And she never failed to be right. A couple of goals would have saved the day. But scoring those goals is where matters got a little tricky and defied the footballing wisdom of Rafa Benitez, Jurgen Klopp, and Gareth Southgate.

That’s the problem with the word “just”.

“Just Say No” was never as easy as Nancy Reagan made it sound. “Just” didn’t take proper account of peer pressure, the human instinct towards transgression, the psychology around depression and seeking a quick fix of happiness (or what one perceived as happiness), as well as the effect that drugs have on the body.

Nike at one time promoted their product with the catchphrase “Just do it”, the “it” being whatever it was that their big-name celebrity endorsers did. The suggestion seemed to be that once you had the best shoes or suitably slash-marked pants, it was “just” a matter of running that world record time or scoring those World Cup goals.

Just. Just. Just.

Wherever you see the word “just” you can be sure there’s some moronic oversimplification coming. Just Eat promises food delivered to your door 24/7 and completely overlooks the reality of choosing what to eat (and how the hell to pay for it) in this age of health fads and a standard-of-living crisis.

Just Watch promises to help you sort out your streaming choices but throws you into the deep end of competing contracts, contradictory subscription models, and the whole problem of what you’re allowed to watch in what country at what time and using a specific app, browser, or machine.

Then, of course, we now have “Just Stop Oil” telling us that it’s really easy to break a century-long reliance on a product that has become the cornerstone of the biggest industrial revolution since the Industrial Revolution.

And I can’t stress this enough. I want to stop oil. I don’t have a car. I’m aware of my environmental impact. I recycle until I’m green in the face, but “just” doesn’t make it a trivial problem. If the campaign were more accurately named, it would be channelling the exasperation of that Scouse mother in the A&E room. Maybe we could have “Holy Mary, Mother of God! You’ve got a ****ing hole in your ozone layer, so won’t you please stop using oil!”

There’s just no “just” about it.

@DavidWaywell

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