BBC Learning English
Keep Your English Up To Date
19th October 2010
Issue
When we have to talk about something that may be going wrong, where there s some trouble
brewing, or something that might disturb or upset people, we may feel we have to choose our
words carefully. We don t want to add fuel to the flames.
You might think that  problem was quite an innocuous word to use in such situations. But
recently, it seems, people have begun to find it a little too negative, overstressing the bad side
of things. They ve been looking for an alternative way to say  problem .
Now, where there are matters that need to be addressed, they re often referred to as  issues .
Such matters are often difficult. And so people have started to use  issue to mean  problem .
You need to be careful with it, though. It s not a simple one-for-one substitution. You
wouldn t generally talk about  solving an issue , and you certainly can t say  no issue .
But you find it in such contexts as  That s not an issue , or  Do you have issues with that? , or
 the issues surrounding nuclear waste management .
And of course, if something s a terrible disaster, then  problem comes into its own as a
calming word: when the spacecraft Apollo 13 broke down on its way to the Moon in 1970, the
crew coolly radioed back to Earth  Houston, we have a problem .
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John Ayto is a lexicographer and a writer on words and language. He began his dictionary
career as one of the editors of the first edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English, and over the past twenty years he has produced a range of his own books on the
history and use of words, including the Bloomsbury Dictionary of Word Origins, the Oxford
Dictionary of Modern Slang and Twentieth-Century Words, a survey of the new words that
came into the English language during the twentieth century. He edited the 17th edition of
Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable, and he has broadcast extensively on lexical matters.
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