an abundance of caution

This phrase, now a cliché of the pandemic , derives from C17th  legal expression ex abundanti cautela, which covered a situation where a lender wanted more collateral for the loan than was, strictly speaking, required.  The extra demand was made out of an abundance of caution to cover the loan. 

 The phrase was certainly in use pre-pandemic.  In 2019 Boeing said that it was grounding all its 737 Max8 aircraft out of an abundance of caution. This was after a couple of them fell out of the sky so it is possible to see here what became a common mechanism for smoothing over a troubling situation and providing reassurance with this oh-so-comforting mantra.

 Scott Morrison seems to have had it in his lexical armoury before the pandemic as well. When the Census database crashed in 2016 he assured Australians that they could safely and confidently complete the Census now that the database was restored. The fact that it had been taken down the previous night was a regrettable inconvenience but ‘as you know, the decision was taken out of an abundance of caution’.

 So when the pandemic struck he was among the first to pull out this phrase.

As early as January 31, 2020, while declaring a public health emergency, he said:

"Australia has been acting, and our states have been acting with an abundance of caution and working in close cooperation with the Commonwealth."

 In America in 2009 Barack Obama misspoke his oath of office at his swearing in as President so it was decided that, out of an abundance of caution, he should retake the oath the following day.  The Americans also had their moments of caution during the pandemic, most notably when Trump was taken to hospital.  The Washington Post reported this, noting that the phrase 

 ‘has a calming, authoritative ring. It feels like a pat on the back from a trusted leader who’s too busy at the moment to go into details. Trump didn’t actually need to be transported by helicopter to a military hospital, it implied. He was barely sick, had a bit of a sniffle. The White House had taken this extreme and potentially alarming step simply to be on the safe side. Because they had so much caution that they could afford to do so.’

 Another American commentator, Bridget Read, said:

 ‘[the phrase] has an air of rhetorical largess; it implies politeness and restraint instead of flailing panic. It’s a verbal lasso around galloping unpredictability.’

 The vaccine rollout seems to have created the need for even more abundance of caution, partly used as a soother, partly used as an excuse for the slow delivery.

I find myself suffocating under the weight of this manipulative verbiage.

As a postscript to this I can report that Sachin Tendulkar has his own variation on this phrase. He went to hospital ‘as a matter of abundant precaution under medical advice’.