Even in an ICAC hearing room, there’s no escape. “I don’t have a recollection around it,” says a witness.

There could be many reasons why someone giving evidence at the Independent Commission Against Corruption’s sensational Operation Rosny inquiry is watching their language. But let’s assume that eloquence isn’t one of them.

Even if the ICAC doesn’t care, eloquence is the hill that writers die on. The growing attachment to one word – on the airwaves, in print, in daily conversations – is equally worthy of investigation, and so early each morning, I’m ready with tablet, dedicated listening app, and radio on, determined not to miss the latest transgressions. The first one doesn’t take long.

“We need to be aware around ...” I correct the speaker aloud and note the offence. Another soon follows: “I have a sense of shame around ...” On it goes, whether it’s lobbying around, concerns around, conflicts of interest around, special sensitivity around, or reading that Iran has renewed a list of demands around the Strait of Hormuz’s reopening.

Nor is there relief in the evenings. A recent Four Corners investigation into the nation’s affordable housing schemes provided a wealth of quotes – all of them, to be clear, taken from the answers, not the questions put by the ABC’s Pat McGrath to his interviewees.

Some extracts: “We can have a decision around who’s best placed”, “you need to speak to the minister for housing around that”, and “a mentality has taken over around …”

What ever became of ABOUT?

Do you really think William Shakespeare would have contemplated Much Ado Around Nothing?

For me, the abandonment of about and its stand-ins, such as of, hit home three years ago, while reading a well-crafted sentence in an article * by Ben Macintyre in The Times*. “As always in France,” he wrote, “the confrontation is being framed as a matter of high intellectual principle …”

Did you note the absence of that clunky preposition, around? It isn’t missed, is it? Macintyre’s seamless prose compelled me to read to the end of his piece about the “war” in Paris between authorities and the city’s second-hand booksellers, whose open-air kiosks along the Seine are a tradition dating back hundreds of years. Or, as Macintyre put it so wonderfully: “The Seine, they say, is the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves.”

The diminishing of the language was already taking place in the 1980s. Twelve years ago, Ben Yagoda, an American author and professor of English, revealed in the online magazine Slate that in 1987 he overheard a psychologist at a party discussing articles “around weight issues”. Yagoda’s wife told him later: “They use that word a lot in the helping professions.”

Prepositions, wrote Yagoda, were “notoriously unstable … so it is with the longstanding preposition creep from about to around … you can see why around would emerge and gain ground on about and the other alternatives, like regarding and having to do with. They are static and one-dimensional, while around gives a nice, tangible sense of concerns bearing on all different sides of the topic at hand.”

If he says so.

I’ll try to cope with memories around childhood and asking questions around a subject (heard endlessly). It’s not as if around, a perfectly legitimate word when used correctly, was ever marginalised. Think of Jules Verne, author of Around the World In Eighty Days. And the expression “going around in circles” has an exciting new lease on life. You know, Trump’s peace talks. Spin.

The plain-English meanings of about include approximate, but perhaps it’s become too direct a word for the times. I feel we’ve become reticent to say precisely what we mean, and around sounds even more nebulous than *about. *

Which might explain what’s happening in a roundabout way. Strange, to think the two words joined forces twice. Roundabouts. They still bamboozle me.

Nikki Barrowclough is a freelance writer.