Almost as alarming as the prospect of the Iranian regime acquiring nuclear weapons was the revelation that another metaphor had been verbed.
An ‘on-ramp’ has been used for some time as a synonym for a gateway or access point in the US press. The New York Times recently reported that ‘critics and independent researchers say YouTube has inadvertently created a dangerous on-ramp to extremism’. It’s what in Britain we call a slip road, a road leading on to a dual carriageway, so it is not a bad analogy for a way of accelerating into the mainstream. It even cropped up in The Guardian the other day, in an article, admittedly by an American, about yoga, which she described as her ‘therapeutic on-ramp’ to a state of control over her body.
