I know from our newspapers, and from many a conversation, that our political masters and mistresses are going at each other in Parliament and elsewhere as they always have and, apparently, always will, except for Sam Hinds who I find maintains a calm dignity even in his most adversarial communications which no one else seems able to achieve.
The verbal battles are generally exceedingly unimaginative. We need new and more innovative swear-words. We need to lift the level of vituperation. The insults are of a low standard and boringly repetitive.
The nouns are varied – scandal, shame, misery, murderation, nonsense, disgrace, confusion, shambles, corruption, chaos, mess – but the adjectives attached to the nouns never vary very much. Indeed a lot of the time a single, ancient, Anglo-Saxon expletive, which I see has been allowed to appear in the latest editions of Webster’s dictionary, serves privately to define whatever sort of mess, chaos, scandal, or disgrace is being described. Surely we can invent subtler and more descriptive language to lambast those in
