When first asked to extend free school meals over the holidays, the British government pointed to its “uplift” to universal credit of £20 per week. The media dutifully mentioned the “uplift”, but when did it become impermissible to say simply “raise” or “increase”?

It was the American writer Nathaniel Parker Willis, friend of Edgar Allan Poe, who first used “uplift” as a compound noun in 1845, in a poem describing the baby prophet Nathan’s presentation to King David: “His brow / Had the inspired up-lift of the king’s.” In the following decade geologists described how land could be subject to “uplift” over time. Not until the mid-20th century was it adopted in business to mean (at first) an increase in prices, and therefore profits – as in the fees charged to the government by Serco.

Perhaps the government hopes that by causing everyone to refer to an “uplift” in universal credit, they will seed the idea that their policies are uplifting in the happy-making sense (from the late 19th century). Meanwhile scientists have been keeping a close eye in recent years on “uplifts” in Yellowstone Park, caused by fresh magma deep in the supervolcano. A new mega-eruption would surely be very 2020.

• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.