Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

The roots of Labour’s bigotry

Another word which has gained a new meaning in the present decade, along with ‘vulnerable’ and ‘diverse’: survivor. Once it meant a person who had been transported to Auschwitz but somehow came out alive. Or a person who had been involved in a terrible car crash but had escaped with only a broken neck. Today it means someone whose nipple was perhaps gently tweaked by a light entertainment star 40 years ago. Or someone who was mildly and almost certainly justifiably bullied at school.

I’m also getting a little weary of the elephant in the room. It has become for me, when talking about transformative grammar, the elephant in the room. I heard a woman on Radio 4 say: ‘Well, the thing is, Sarah, there are so many elephants in the room.’ More elephants in the room than there are in the wild, I suspect.

The woman had made reference to the hidden pachyderms while lecturing us all about some form of discrimination I hadn’t previously known existed. This was ‘colourism’, which is the tendency of some mixed race people to be sneering about other mixed race people who have darker skin than them. The woman on the radio said we needed to have a ‘conversation’ about colourism. But that’s another word which is beginning to be denuded of its original meaning — i.e., a two-way discourse. The woman didn’t mean that. By ‘conversation’ she meant to harangue you at great length until the spittle was dripping off your chin. She then started jabbering about skin-bleaching products, which she didn’t like one bit. Hell, I felt like telling her, leave them alone, they’re just aspirational products.

We need to switch these new clichés about, these nonce words and neologisms, subvert them a little.

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