Originally Posted by
Two's in
"The aerial surveillance platform has been beset by problems and has seen the budget spiral from £800m to more than £1.4 million."
Pedantic I know, but if you look at a spiral it's a lot like a circle in that it goes in all directions, so if costs were "spiraling" they'd be oscillating between going up and down (amongst other repeated changes)
To be sure a spiral has, within its definition, the fact that it traces a locus that's forever getting further away from (or indeed nearer to) the starting point, so perhaps that's what they mean
...at least they didn't say spiral when they meant helix. That's
really annoying