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Sunday 27 May 2012

And another thing

Not so much the Mad Hatter, more the Mad Scientist now

In this age of creeping censorship ‘mad’ is not a word to be used lightly. It would certainly be unlawful to use it in Kipling’s sense when he refers to frontier tribes being ‘stirred up’ by ‘a mad mullah’.

In this age of creeping censorship ‘mad’ is not a word to be used lightly. It would certainly be unlawful to use it in Kipling’s sense when he refers to frontier tribes being ‘stirred up’ by ‘a mad mullah’. I rather think Winston Churchill used it in this sense in his book The Malakand Field Force, but then practically everything the old boy said or wrote in moments of excitement or exaltation would now be banned. To be fair, mad has long been suspect. The OED states, a little pompously one might think: ‘The word has always had some tinge of contempt or disgust, and would now [1989] be quite inappropriate in medical use, or in referring sympathetically to an insane person as the subject of an infliction.’

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