We all have out pet hates among words, and usually it's just a prejudice brought on by one's age or culture. “Normalcy” strikes me as barbarous, but to an American it’s normal. “Plethora” seems straightforwardly ugly, as does “smörgâsbord”, though to a Swede the latter probably seems inoffensive and perhaps even euphonious. Mercifully the fashion for referring to an appetising array of miscellaneous cultural goods as a “smörgâsbord” has died away, which points to an inherent wisdom in language. It has a purgative or self-regulating function, which eventually gets rid of the worst excrescences. Remember when “situation” was tacked on to any phrase to make it seem more important, as in “we have a serious emergency situation here”?

However, though “situation” may have died, the motive that impelled it – the desire to make something appear important by dressing it up with excess verbiage – lives on. It shows that the exasperation we feel at society’s verbal tics might be more than personal. We react badly because we discern an undeclared motive below the word. In short, we smell a rat.

The Matisse exhibition at Tate Modern brings real meaning to the word 'vibrant'.

I smell a rat with “vibrant”, which right now seems to be everywhere. It’s partly the time of year. “Vibrant” is applied to loud, clashing colours, and people gladly turn to those after the drabness of winter. In the arts vibrancy is bursting out all over, at summer festivals. It’s there too in the colours of Matisse’s late cut-outs, on display at Tate Modern in London until 7 September. These are constantly being described as “vibrant”, as indeed they are. Like many weasel words, this one used to have an innocent meaning, and just occasionally it resurfaces.

Mostly, though, “vibrant” is laden with ideological weight. Instead of functioning as a straightforward adjective, it’s now a marker of things which are held to be desirable by those in authority. You get a clue as to what those desirable things are by perusing such things as urban regeneration plans, or policy documents of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. Say for example a firm of architects is commissioned to reconfigure a square or a neighbourhood, or a local authority wants to create an arts festival. There’s a particular quality the writers of these documents always yearn for; vibrancy. It seems no neighbourhood is worth living in unless it can be described as vibrant, and no festival is worth public subsidy unless it too can be called vibrant.