by ADAM RAWNSLEY

For the love of history, please stop saying “the height of the Cold War.”

You’ve heard the phrase before. It’s become a de rigeur bit of language reporters apply in just about any piece of journalism about the Cold War. It’s meant to signify that there was an especially tense geopolitical atmosphere for the reference time period.

But thanks to that overuse, it’s an effectively meaningless phrase that mangles history and popular understanding of an important historical phenomenon.

The result is that now, according to journalism, almost every year of the Cold War was “the height of the Cold War.”

Sure, this is a thoroughly pedantic complaint. And the reporter who hasn’t used a cliche is just a reporter who hasn’t written very much.

But the abuse of “the height of the Cold War” isn’t just about making Clio, the muse of history, shed a tear every time you write something mildly historically inaccurate. It highlights how we misunderstand and misapply that period in other contexts today.

Lest you doubt the extent of journalistic abuse of the “height of the Cold War” War Is Boring compiled an utterly unscientific sampling of major news outlets’ use of the phrase.

With the exception of four years spread across the the very beginning and end of the conflict, there’s at least one article in a major news outlet proclaiming every year of the period to be “the height of the Cold War.”

So what could credibly be called the “height” of the superpower standoff between the United States and the Soviet Union?

To determine the most appropriate use of the phrase, we polled three historians of the Cold War—and all were fairly consistent in their judgment.

The historians are: Dr. William Burr, director of the nuclear history documentation project at the National Security Archive of George Washington University; Dr. Mark Kramer, program director of the Project on Cold War Studies at Harvard’s Davis Center; and Dr. James Hershberg, professor of history in international affairs and former director of the Cold War International History Project at the Woodrow Wilson Center

All three men pointed to years leading up to and including the Cuban Missile Crisis as well as the late 1940s and early ’50s, when the U.S. faced off against the Soviets and the Chinese over Berlin and the Korean War.