The government jargon-turning mills must have rung to cheers of delight when the phrase breathing space was minted afresh, all shiny and unworn. Its glory is to suggest a dawn in which it is bliss to be alive, but without tying anyone down to vulgar sums. The Chancellor has said the Budget will give households more ‘breathing space’. Is that breathing space on a wide sunny upland or is it a dark, uncertain air pocket in a capsized yacht?

I was surprised to find how old the phrase is. George Joye, who believed he lived that in the age of Antichrist, was consoled in the 1540s that God (not the Chancellor) ‘at some certain season giveth a little breathing space to his chirche, making the fyerce seas cawme for a little tyme’. There, space denotes time. This meaning, along with distance or area, was present in classical Latin, from which the word was borrowed via French. Like the parallel phrase breathing room, first encountered in the 1640s, breathing space retained the primary meaning of ‘time to breathe: ‘Pauses at the end of a movement, over a rest, or even over a silent bar, are intended to give a short breathing-space,’ said Grove’s Dictionary of Music in 1880. ‘We had two hours if we wanted to get to the courthouse with any kind of breathing room,’ says a 2012 quotation collected by the OED.

When John Gower wrote, before 1400, that ‘Astronomie maketh a man have knowlechinge of sterres and what between hem is of space,’ he meant the distance between stars. A manuscript from 1475 at Trinity College, Cambridge, uses space for the circumference of the globe: ‘The erthes space, how long hit ys abowte … foure and twenty thowsand myle in hys circuite he conteyneth.’ Since the Earth is about 24,901 miles around, the estimate was quite close.

In The Spectator (no relation) of Friday 9 July 1714, Joseph Addison published thoughts on the night sky. ‘The noblest and most exalted way of considering this infinite space.’ he thinks, ‘is that of Sir Isaac Newton, who calls it the sensorium of the Godhead.’ I fear Addison assumed God was an infinitely spread-out gas, touching everything in creation.