Try your hand at our quiz here

The end of 2012 is nigh; so it’s a fitting time to reflect on the tastiness of the generous portions of popular orange vegetables dished up by the world of news in recent months.

For the uninitiated, popular orange vegetables (Povs) are gratuitous synonyms employed often on subsequent mention of a noun. Some are funny, some bizarre – but all merit the description “inelegant variation”, the product of a laboured approach to what the lexicologist HW Fowler’s termed “elegant variation”.

2012 has yielded a rich harvest. In a year when the glorious London Olympics (despite all the associated security troubles) lit up the summer, familiar, heavyweight news stories – Syria, the eurozone meltdown, the US election – dominated the international agenda for months. Domestically, the recurring themes – coalition politics, economic policy, the NHS, bankers, Leveson and Murdoch – were matched in intensity by a host of arriviste headline-grabbers: BBC incompetence, Jimmy Savile and other child abuse scandals, “plebgate” and the all too eagerly imported omnipresence of Gangnam-style.

It’s also been a year of the beleaguered, an adjective used in many a Pov to betray – unnecessarily, of course – a sense of personal or professional crisis patently clear from the context of the piece. Cameron and Osborne, and their anaemic strategy for economic growth, have remained beleaguered pretty much all year. Poor old not-so-poor Nick Buckles became synonymous with the word during the G4S Olympic security debacle.

Meanwhile Andrew Lansley confirmed his irrevocably worsening reputation by going from bog-standard “beleaguered” to “the already embattled health secretary”; the next stop for him was, naturally, to be ditched in a reshuffle – to be replaced by the previously “beleaguered culture secretary” Jeremy Hunt.

That lovely Andrew Mitchell went one better than Lansley: he rose, in just a few weeks, from customary embattled/beleaguered to “the multi-millionaire, public schoolboy, former merchant banker, fine-wine collector, all-round clot chief whip” in the eyes of one national newspaper writer.

With all this 2012 Povvery in mind, try this festive quiz – the latest in a quite irregular series. All you need to do is guess the correct nouns from the Pov phrase.

via Media: Mind your language | theguardian.com http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2012/dec/20/language