What is Self Storage?
Self! Reflexive! I wash myself; I feed myself; I talk to myself; I play with myself. But it's not that simple. Some uses require a more intimate cultural perspective. A self-adhesive pad is not one that sticks to itself (though ironically that annoyance happens quite often), but one that sticks by itself without you having to apply adhesive. What about the recently introduced self-adhesive stamps? They already had glue on them. This time they stick by themselves without you having to lick them. Stretchy stuff this self business. The BBC used to irritate me with its persistent use of "self-declared demilitarized zone". Presumably the justification is that the warring factions agreed amongst themselves to limit the hostilities, rather than being imposed upon.
The coup de grâce is "the self-declared war on terrorism". What the self is for in this construction is beyond me. But I posit the following. In his Complete Plain Words, Sir Ernest Gowers ends his list of misuses of the word 'overall' with the following example: "By their victory in the World Cup England clearly proved themselves the best team overall." He suggests that 'overall' here means simply 'hip, hip, hooray'. Could it be that "the self-declared war on terrorism" is really "the war on terrorism (hip, hip, hooray)". Or even, by way of Freudian slip "the war on terrorism that I declare myself in favour of"? Let's hope that the war doesn't turn out to be as silly as the adjectives being applied to it.
