While Mr S is used to reporting from the sideline on Twitter wars, he tends to refrain from taking part in them. So Steerpike was amused to find himself in Louise Mensch’s firing line this morning. His sin? Being Peter Hitchens, apparently.
Mensch accused the Mail on Sunday columnist of being the author of this very column. She said that unlike Hitchens, she didn’t write stories about him. When Hitchens pointed out that he hadn’t written about Mensch for seven years, the former Tory MP suggested that he was in fact… Mr Steerpike:
While Mr S is sorry to break the news that he is not, in fact, Hitchens, happily, this revelation didn’t get in the way of the pair’s spat, with Hitchens going on to ask Mensch if her tweets were written by a Teletubby.
In Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, Humpty-Dumpty tells Alice: ‘When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.’ The assertion is intentionally absurd. If every-one adopted their own idiosyncratic lexical definitions, language wouldn’t function, and we’d all blither unintelligibly in a Tower of Babel. But
Steerpike
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