Why has the word ‘grandmother’ been banned by the Guardian?

There are too few active homosexuals and career women in the Third World. This is because blacks and Asians — from Australasia to Bangalore — have a tendency to put them in a pot, cook them and eat them. Primitive African tribes also eat crippled people — those in a wheelchair, or merely suffering from a hare lip — and indeed those they consider to be ethnic minorities. I know of one handicapped spinster who committed suicide rather than be eaten by some gypsies in Bombay. Her illegitimate daughter, an air hostess, who herself had given birth to Siamese twins in Calcutta, appealed for clemency but this fell on deaf ears. She is now an illegal asylum seeker living in the province of Northern Ireland — and a grandmother to boot, with a bachelor son.

Oh, enough, enough. I had intended to work my way through the entire book, but that will do for now. There’s 27 of them up there, in that peculiar opening paragraph; words or phrases which have been banned by one of our national morning newspapers, the Guardian. It recently gave away a free style guide to its readers, just in case they were mystified by its occasional weird language. Most of my transgressions you will be able to spot, I would guess — Third World, active homosexual, crippled, handicapped, deaf ears (a phrase which makes deaf people cross, apparently, although not if you whisper it), career women (all women are potential career women, OK?) and grandmother (why refer to her familial position at all, you reactionary pig?). Others may come as a surprise — ethnic minorities is not on, you have to say minority ethnic instead. There is of course no semantic difference between these two constructs, any more than there is between the currently fashionable ‘people of colour’ and the utterly de trop ‘coloured people’.