It’s an odd turn of the syllables. When I first heard the phrase, it was about the coronavirus. The words gave me pause. In the US, President Trump tested positive and was heading to the hospital for a few days. Cautious. I doubted that the danger to him was negligible. If you’re hospitalized, something major is probably going on.

Someone described the phrase as “precautions taken against a very remote contingency”. I kept returning to the strangeness of the words, and asked myself if I really wanted to armour myself against remote possibilities.

Oodles of caution seem to be spreading:

1. Seventy students and staff members at a high school go into quarantine after two teens contracted Covid

2. A professional football player developed some tightness and muscle soreness in his right calf. The coaches chose to remove him from the game

3. Some college students won’t be travelling home for Christmas due to Covid restrictions

4. Hackers injected malware into some government software. The programs have been removed

5. Schools switch to remote learning after coronavirus cases in the community rise, although the infection rate in local schools is low

6. Protests in the US about the death of George Floyd lead to the temporary boarding up of some stores in Vancouver, Canada

7. Most Republican politicians in the US Congress won’t say that Joe Biden is the President-Elect

8. Some people who speak out on TV about US politics (and some election officials who keep to the rule of law) are provided with security at home, at work, and while they commute

9. Today, as the Electoral College certified the results of the US election, some states changed the locations of the meetings and didn’t reveal those locations

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I’m not disputing the potential value of these precautions but they do point to a hesitancy in modern life. Many people are unwilling to take chances, to burst nakedly into life full speed ahead, to be publicly themselves. Whatever happened to throwing caution to the wind?