Language

‘With’ is not a fucking conjunction

In journalistic writing, ‘with’ is threatening to become the only connector in town. Whatever happened to good old ‘and’?

Every pedant has a pet hate. Whether it’s Oxford commas, Americanisms, lost participles or absent apostrophes, every armchair grammarian has one particular slip that grinds their gears. Several leagues clear at the top of my shit list is “with”.

Firefighters are battling to contain a massive blaze moving “like lightning” on the outskirts of Athens, with authorities evacuating people from towns, villages and hospitals as flames rip through trees, homes and cars.

OK, you say, it might not be exactly how I would have phrased it, but it hardly merits a pop-eyed 2,000-word blog post. Does it?

Well, let’s take a look at what’s going on here. The writer of the offending passage is trying to convey two pieces of information in one sentence. One, that firefighters are tackling a serious wildfire near Athens; two, that people have been evacuated from the area. So they’ve written two separate clauses, and joined them. With “with”.

Now English has a class of words designed to perform exactly this function. They’re called conjunctions. You know: “and”, “but”, “when”, “because”, and all those other linking words. My problem is that “with” does not fucking number among them.

In any dictionary you care to check, “with” is listed as a preposition: a word that shows direction, location, or time, or some similar figurative sense. Off my rocker. Up the wall. At my wits’ end. Even when erroneously pressed into service as above, with is still a preposition. You can tell because it still wants to behave like one.

The Austrians urged their EU counterparts to continue the effort to stamp out the tragedy in the Mediterranean, with more than 2,000 people suffocating or drowning last year.

While conjunctions will happily segue into full clauses (I read the paper and my jaw dropped), prepositions can only take nouns* as an object. That’s why the verbs in the sentences above suddenly have -ing at the end: the writer has, probably without realising, had to turn “suffocate” and “drown” into participles — verbs that act as adjectives by modifying the preceding noun — in order to meet the grammatical demands of “with”.

(*Technically noun phrases, but now is not the time to get bogged down in technicallies.)

Even so, my imagined detractors cry, this is hardly the most heinous of crimes. Why should we care?

For five reasons.

1) Eww

Rowley became commissioner in September 2022, having retired in 2018 after a career in several forces, with him first joining the Met in 2011 as an assistant commissioner.

This reporter has tried to squeeze three pieces of related information into one sentence, which is a perfectly respectable and achievable aim, but sheesh, couldn’t they have done so with a little panache?

As well as the usual grammatical contortions, they’ve ended up with three different verb forms and had to refer to the subject twice in the space of a few words (“Rowley” and “him”). Wouldn’t something like this be simpler and clearer?

Rowley became commissioner in September 2022, having joined the Met in 2011 as assistant commissioner, served in several forces, and retired in 2018.

2) Huh?

The prime minister has already pledged to establish closer ties with the EU, with the new minister for European relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, travelling to Brussels for an introductory meeting with Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic on Monday.

This article was published on a Friday. The grammatical whims of “with” have denied us some important information: the tense of the subordinate clause. Did Thomas-Symonds go to Brussels last Monday, or is he going next Monday?

> Following the prime minister’s pledge to establish closer ties with the EU, the new minister for European relations, Nick Thomas-Symonds, will travel to Brussels for an introductory meeting with Brexit negotiator Maros Sefcovic on Monday.

3) Shrug

Holly Willoughby leaves ITV with questions to answer over Phillip Schofield lying

Hold on. Does Holly Willoughby have questions to answer? Does ITV? Or are these questions anyone can take? Has some action by Holly Willoughby led to questions being asked of ITV? A year later, I’m still not 100% sure what this Sunday Times headline was getting at.

With is a busy little word bee. Even though it’s only a preposition and not a fucking conjunction, it’s the 15th most commonly used word in the English language (according to the Oxford English Corpus) and the OED lists 96 separate meanings for it.

These myriad functions are already a common cause of confusion; consider the sentence “I shot with the man with the gun”, and why this regular column in the Guardian is the only one that has a comma.

With is already buckling under the strain of its multiple duties. Surely it makes no sense to add to them?

4) Grrr

One of the oddest things about this linguistic oddity is that it’s almost entirely unique to journalists. Barring a few instances that have leaked into the real world, you’ll never find “with” moonlighting as a conjunction in novels or poems or everyday speech.

There’s a word for language that’s unique to one class of people: jargon. Jargon marks out a group as special and, whether intentionally or not, alienates non-members. Which is fine when that group are specialists, like engineers or soldiers or gamers, talking mostly among themselves.

But journalism is all about conveying information to the wider world. It should be intelligible to as many people as possible. To use forms that are alien to the reader is to throw up walls in an arena that should be wall-less.

(The phenomenon may, incidentally, have been born from good intentions. Because the best reporting is neutral, eschewing value judgments, loaded terms and assumptions of guilt and causation, and because exact sequences of events are not always immediately known, it’s not always appropriate to use more specific connectors like “because” or “after”. This leaves us with bland old “and”, which can quickly become repetitive.)

5) Aaarrrrgghhhhh

If “with” was occasionally being wheeled out in an innocuous attempt to stave off monotony, then yes, I’d still be swearing, just not publicly.

But it’s everywhere. You’ll struggle to find a news (or especially business or media) story without at least one conscripted “with”. While subediting, I’ve come across as many as three in one paragraph. Sometimes it feels as if “and” has become an ex-conjunction.

Fortunately, other connectors are available.

Sometimes the meaningful conjunctions, like when, because or amid, are perfectly fine. Sometimes a pronoun like “which” or “who” will do the trick. Simply dropping the “with” and running with the participial form is another option, as are semicolons and full stops.

There will no doubt be some diehard descriptivists out there who can reel off a string of sentences by giants of literature using “with” as a fucking conjunction. All I have to say to you is: they could have done better.

Here are some examples I’ve come across in recent years, and suggested improvements.

The rear door of a restaurant in Ormeau Road was also kicked in, with racial slurs shouted at the workers inside.

> The rear door of a restaurant in Ormeau Road was also kicked in, and racial slurs were shouted at the workers inside.

As of Saturday, 779 people had been arrested in connection with the riots, with 349 of those charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

> As of Saturday, 779 people had been arrested in connection with the riots, 349 of whom had been charged, according to the National Police Chiefs’ Council.

The tone was set by Boris Johnson, with the British prime minister opening the Cop26 talks with a stark warning …

Oh, come on.

> The tone was set by Boris Johnson, who opened the Cop26 talks with a stark warning …

The left-back was a free agent after leaving Tottenham, with the north Londoners having paid around £25m to buy him from Fulham in 2019.

> The left-back was a free agent after leaving Tottenham, who had paid Fulham around £25m for him in 2019.

ONS data showed a strong performance in the second quarter, with the service sector helping drive growth.

> ONS data showed a strong performance in the second quarter, driven partly by the service sector.

The EPC is designed to facilitate the strengthening of ties between EU and non-EU leaders in an informal setting, with previous conferences held in Spain, Moldova and the Czech Republic.

> The EPC, which has previously held conferences in Spain, Moldova and the Czech Republic, is designed to facilitate the strengthening of ties between EU and non-EU leaders in an informal setting.

With brands the driving force behind the industry’s growth, they account for £1bn of sales and 2.5bn bottles.

> Brands are the driving force behind the industry’s growth, accounting for £1bn of sales and 2.5bn bottles.

Sales of no- and low-alcohol beer are seeing a summer surge, with brewers boosting production to meet growing demand.

> Brewers are boosting production of no- and low-alcohol beer after a summer surge in sales.

Freer’s comments come 10 years after the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act achieved royal assent on 17 July 2013, allowing same-sex couples to marry and convert civil partnerships into marriage, with Freer converting his civil partnership with Angelo Crolla to marriage in 2015.

> Freer’s comments come 10 years after the Marriage Act, which allows same-sex couples to marry and convert civil partnerships into marriage, achieved royal assent on 17 July 2013. Freer converted his civil partnership with Angelo Crolla to marriage in 2015.

Ministers have said they want to tighten the law on glorifying terrorism, with the conduct of a minority of people on the pro-Palestine demonstrations in recent weeks, including the chanting of the controversial slogan “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free”, prompted pledges of change.

(Here, it’s been so long since “with” wrote its unwieldy grammar cheque, the reporter’s forgotten to cash it.)

> Ministers have said they want to tighten the law on glorifying terrorism, a pledge prompted by the conduct of a minority of people …

The typical London rent also hit a new high of £2,633, with average costs in the capital now 5.3% higher than 12 months earlier.

The cack-handed use of “with” here has forced the writer to use not just London and a synonym for London in the same sentence, but also typical rent and a synonym for typical rent! Isn’t “Average London rents hit a new high of £2,600, 5.3% higher than 12 months earlier” less annoying to read?

A desert planet is also featured prominently, with comparisons between Tattooine and Arrakis able to be drawn thanks to their basic geography.

> Tattooine and Arrakis are both desert planets.

The majority of reviewers gave Dune: Part Two a 10-star rating, with only five reviews ranking it below five stars, with many complimenting its blend of “visual splendor and narrative depth.”

> I’m actually shaking too much to attempt this one.

The cost of borrowing has soared in the past two years with retail businesses finding it particularly difficult to raise debt amid concerns about consumer spending amid a surge in the cost of essentials such as food and energy bills.

> [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleep] [bleeeeeeeeeeep]

The mountainness of this molehill is not so much that “with” as a clause connector is flat out wrong and should never be allowed — although it is, and it shouldn’t, because it’s not a fucking conjunction — but that it’s clumsy and lazy and vague, that it’s already doing more than its fair share of jobs in English, and that there are countless ways of producing the same effect with none of these drawbacks.

Language changes! some will say. Keep up, you old duffer! Well, yes, it does, but the changes that stick are generally for the better, offering some nuance or functionality that wasn’t there before. This one blows from every angle.

Journalists: dispense with ‘with’ with immediate effect

The number of people obtaining their news from decent news sites is falling off a cliff. Moreover, their visits are getting shorter; the average time spent reading a news article on the Guardian website (and, I’m sure, on all the others) is less than a minute.

The reasons mooted for this include increased competition and dwindling attention spans driven by instant-gratification culture. But I propose a further cause: a drop in quality.

To an extent, this was bound to happen. Newspapers have far fewer resources than they used to, having lost much of their advertising revenue to the internet, and the all-consuming need for speed means there’s less time for primping. But lazy, confusing, repetitive, cut-and-paste prose is not the magic bullet that will bring the readers swarming back.

Apples and oranges: how bad metaphors mess with your mind

The far right’s awful analogies helped swing Brexit – and now they may threaten your life

“Apt analogies are among the most formidable weapons of the rhetorician” – Winston Churchill

For too long, too many people have been listening to populists: know-nothing blatherskites offering simple solutions to complex problems. As a result, the UK has left the EU, nutsacking the economy and the opportunities of the young and triggering a massive rise in racial and class hatred; Jair Bolsonaro has laid waste to the Amazon rainforest; and Americans have elected an incompetent, incontinent, incoherent pussy-grabbing golf cheat as president.

How did the far right achieve this coup? With lies, mostly; but blatant lies most people can see through. Subtler tinkerings with the truth are far more effective.

In 1987, the French scholar Françoise Thom wrote an essay describing the Newspeak-style “wooden language” that the totalitarian regime of Soviet Russia used to fob off, confuse and pacify its citizens. (Orwell’s Newspeak was based on a similar idea of language as an instrument of control.) She identified four main characteristics:

use of abstract terms over concrete – attractive-sounding but empty slogans (think “Brexit means Brexit”, “Global Britain”, “Take back control”, “Get Brexit done”, “levelling up”), and vague terms like “sovereignty” and “democracy” and “freedom” that sound great but signifiy nothing;

Manichaeism – nuance-free, black and white thinking that paints everything as a battle between right and wrong, good and evil: “You’re either with us or against us”, “Enemies of the people”, “You lost, get over it”, “Get behind Brexit”;

tautology – repetition of the same idea: “20,000 police officers”, “40 hospitals”, most of the above catchphrases;

bad metaphors.

Since the first three are all pretty self-explanatory, it’s the last one I want to look at.

You may recall learning about similes and metaphors in English lessons. Quick refresher: a simile is a figure of speech that compares one object to another using the words “like” or “as”; a metaphor does the same thing, but by saying the two things are one and the same. So “My love is like a red, red rose” is a simile, while “Love is a battlefield” is a metaphor.

(While, strictly speaking, similes, metaphors and analogies are different things, their difference is largely in form, not function, so I’ll be using the terms more or less interchangeably.)

But it turns out metaphors aren’t just for Robert Burns and Pat Benatar. They underpin the very way we think, and if misused, can actually change what we think. A bold claim, I know. Bear with me.

Why do we use metaphors? In 99.9% of cases, they’re an explanatory tool. Metaphors tend to describe something that is less familiar to the listener in terms of something that is more familiar. The unfamiliar quantity – what psychologist Julian Jaynes (pdf) called a metaphrand, but which is now usually referred to as the target – might be an abstract concept (say, love), a complicated or disputed thing (the EU), or a brand-new thing (like coronavirus). The familiar quantity – the metaphier, or source – will generally be something concrete, which we regularly encounter in everyday life: a rose, a football match, influenza. So in “Love is a battlefield”, “love” is the target, the unfamiliar thing, and “battlefield” is the source.

The point is, we can easily summon a mental picture of battlefields and roses and football matches, and most people have some experience of the flu. We have much more trouble visualising abstract, complex and new things, like love, the EU and coronavirus, so people naturally turn to analogies to demystify them. The catch is that some metaphors do not work as advertised.

Two things determine the quality of a metaphor: the accuracy of the comparison, and its richness – the number of ways in which the things resemble each other. Shakespeare’s “All the world’s a stage” is a good metaphor because there are parallels galore between the stage and everyday life (not that surprising when you consider the stage was created as a representation of the world). Bill explores some of them himself: men and women are like actors, playing roles rather than living out their desires; they enter life, and they leave it, just as actors enter and exit the stage; the various phases of life are a bit like the acts of a play.

If, on the other hand, you’d never heard of sulphuric acid, and I explain it to you by telling you it’s a bit like water, you’ll be justifiably mad at me after you drink it (and survive). Ditto if you encounter your first snake, and I say, “Don’t worry, it’s just a big worm.” Bad metaphors can bite.

If anything ever called for a judicious analogy, it was Brexit. Few people – myself included – understood the full detail of how the EU worked, what the benefits of membership were, what the trade-offs were between sovereignty and trade and geopolitical harmony, and how integrated the UK was in EU supply chains. The far right was quick to fill this gap; two of their metaphors have framed much of the Brexit debate.

1. Oppression/confinement/freedom

“EU dictatorship.” “EU shackles.” “Take back control!”

2. Sport/war

“You lost, get over it.” “You just want a replay until you get the result you want.”

Daniel Hannan quote-tweeting Gary Lineker: "If every football match were replayed until you got a result you liked, England would romp home"

These are superficially powerful lines, which conjure vivid images and cut straight to our sense of self. But as soon as you interrogate them in any detail, they fall apart.

In what respects does the EU resemble a dictatorship? Well … it does take some decisions on its members’ behalf; but it consults its members on those decisions. Members vote on all laws and can veto them. And oftentimes, those members ignore the decisions without sanction.

There are no votes in a dictatorship. They’re run by self-appointed tyrants who tend to reign for life, and they’re characterised by the use of force, propaganda, and an intolerance of opposition and independent media. Dissent is ruthlessly suppressed. And crucially, no one is free to leave a dictatorship.

None of these things apply to the EU, and yet the Brexit gibberlings would have you believe that Guy Verhofstadt is Hitler reincarnated. The propagandists tried to persuade us that the worm was a snake, and a lot of us swallowed it.

Now, in what respects did the EU referendum resemble a football match? A few simple follow-up questions – “What have you won? What have I lost that you haven’t lost too?” “What role did you play in this glorious victory?” “Where do the people who voted leave but have since change their minds fit in, and the handful of remainers who have swung the other way? Are they winners, or losers?” “If your team gets beaten by another one, do you suddenly give up on your team and start supporting the other side?” – expose this comparison as equally flimsy.

When remainers pointed out the possible pitfalls of Brexit, the populists pooped out yet another crap analogy. “Millennium bug!” they chirped. “People issued dire warnings about that, and nothing happened!” Yes, it’s true that then, as now, some people prophesied doom. But that’s literally the only parallel between the two situations. The actors were different, the conditions were different, the entire realm of knowledge was different, the problem was different, and the solutions were different. And crucially, in the case of Y2K, steps were taken to mitigate its effects, without which catastrophe might well have struck.

John Redwood blog comparing Brexit concerns to Millennium bug

(It’s not just the far right that is guilty of this; the populist, pro-Brexit far left also seems to have a predilection for teeth-grindingly terrible comparisons.)

Paul Embery: crap analogy about Labour and shopping

Rachel Swindon: terrible analogy about Corbyn and football

Remainers did hit back with some counter-metaphors – membership of the EU is more like belonging to a golf club, they said: if you stop paying your dues, you no longer get to play on the course or drink in the bar. But it was all too feeble, too late. The right’s shit metaphors had forced their way into enough people’s heads, put down roots, and become unassailable truths.

And as if that wasn’t enough for them, the populist demagogues and disinformants, emboldened by their Brexit “success”, continued to wheel out their cack-handed comparisons in response to the coronavirus.

Hodges tweet: if a mad passenger tried to take over a plane because he didn't trust the pilot, would you help?

Mail on Sunday dross geyser Dan Hodges can’t help himself; he genuinely seems to consider himself a maven of metaphor, the Svengali of simile.

Dan Hodges: coronavirus strategy = football strategy — Football comes up a lot, doesn’t it. Wonder why?

But in their perpetual, desperate quests for attention and relevance, Trump and Brexit party banshee Ann Widdecombe had to go one further.

Trump: coronavirus is no worse than flu (March 9th 2020)

Widdecombe: coronavirus will be like Aids - not as devastating as feared

Covid-19 and influenza are both contagious respiratory illnesses caused by a virus, but that’s as far as the similarities go. The symptoms are different, the infection rates are different, the morbidity rates are different, and the treatments are different. The viruses aren’t even part of the same family.

As for the Aids comparison, where to begin? Aids isn’t even a goddamn virus (it’s the final, often fatal stage of the illness caused by HIV).

Graphic comparing stats/characteristics of flu, Covid-19, Sars and Mers

Trump and Widdecombe’s offhand disinformation goes beyond simple irresponsibility and borders on criminal negligence. Hard though it is to credit, there are people out there who have faith in their wisdom, and they’re repaying their fans by putting their lives in grave danger. (The Express presumably figured this out eventually, or caved in after massive outcry, as it took the Widdecombe column down, which is why I could only screenshot the New European’s response.)

They’ve been at it in America for a while, of course. Anyone who has politely suggested to a gun nut that US gun laws might be a tad on the lax side will be familiar with this retort: “Well, cars kill people too, and no one talks about banning them!”

The problem with this analogy, once again, is that it is fucking shit. Cars are not expressly designed to kill people. Their primary purpose – conveying people and goods from place to place quickly and efficiently – is so damned useful that society has reluctantly decided tolerate the occasional accidental death. Besides, driving is subject to all sorts of rules and regulations. You can’t drive under a certain age, you can’t drive drunk, and you have to obey speed limits and the rules of the road.

“Hold your horses, Bodle – aren’t you getting your panties in a bunch over what are, at the end of the day, just words?” you cry, mixing three metaphors.

But as Hitler and Goebbels knew, as Orwell knew, as the Russian security services and Cambridge Analytica have long known and as others are finally slowly realising, words matter. In an ever more compartmentalised and specialised world, we’ve become unprecedentedly reliant on others for information. On matters we haven’t personally mastered, we have to trust someone. And terrifyingly, a large swath of the population has stopped trusting experts and instead turned to populists and their sloppy, misleading, and often downright dangerous metaphors.

Why am I so concerned about metaphors in particular? Because they’re sneaky. When you encounter a fresh metaphor, it brings you up short. “That’s odd,” thinks your brain. “Not seen that before,” and you take a closer look. If I say, “British shoppers in 2020 are locusts,” you’ll probably spend a couple of seconds weighing it up before deciding whether or not you agree.

If enough people agree with a metaphor, it might catch on, and pass into wider use. So when you read “The elephant in the room” (a metaphorical phrase that dates to the 1950s) or “Take a chill pill” (early 1980s), it’s familiar enough that it no longer has the same jarring effect – you don’t for a second imagine that anyone’s talking about a real pachyderm squatting in your lounge – but still novel enough that you are aware of its metaphorical origin. Now it has become a cliche; if it’s lucky, it might even get promoted to idiom. And when idioms stick around for long enough, a further stage of evolution occurs, and they become part of everyday speech.

The language of abstract relationships – marriages, friendships, etc – almost exclusively borrows the vocabulary of physical relationships. So we talk about the ties between people, breaking up with someone, being close to someone and growing apart. We talk about grasping an idea and beating an opponent and closing a deal. You’ve probably rarely, if ever, reflected on the metaphorical origins of these phrases when using them.

And if you talk about time in any meaningful sense, you will find yourself drawing on the lexicon of space. You simply can’t conceptualise it any other way. You go on a long trip. You were born in the 20^th century. You look back on your youth. Time passes by.

Julian Jaynes’s theory – and I’ve never seen a better one – is that humans have a “mental space” (not a literal one, obviously), a sort of internal theatre, where we visualise things in order to make sense of them, and that without this spatialisation, we can’t properly think about things at all.

Metaphors are not just for bards and bellettrists – they’re part of everyday speech and thought. A huge number of words we use, especially those for abstract concepts, started life as metaphors, but have become so widely used that they have developed meanings of their own. Our dictionaries now contain hundreds of thousands of definitions that have separate entries for the literal and figurative meanings of words.

In fact, if you look up the etymology of any abstract concept you can think of, the chances are, it originated from a word or words for tangible things or everyday actions. The word “understand”, for example, derives from under- (Old English “among”, “close to”) and standan (stand). “Comprehend”, meanwhile, comes from con- (with) and prehendere, to gain hold of: to take within. “Money” can trace its family tree to Latin moneta (“a place where coins are made; a mint”), while the verb “to be” ultimately comes from the Sanskrit bhu, meaning “grow”, while the parts “am” and “is” come from a separate verb meaning “breathe”.

Metaphors, it turns out, are fundamental to our conception of the world. They play a massive role in shaping the way we think.

Suddenly, the populist far right’s strategy comes into focus. By putting out misleading metaphors like “EU dictatorship” and repeating them until blue in the face, they’re trying to normalise them. To make people forget that they are in fact just opinions, and mould them into self-evident truths.

(It turns out that there is a crucial difference between metaphors on the one hand and similes and analogies on the other. Similes and analogies are upfront about their intentions – they explicitly admit that they are comparisons, subjective judgements, up for dispute. Metaphors, meanwhile, brook no dissent.)

Never trust an analogy from a populist. How can they explain things to you when they’re totally unversed in the subject-matter? How can Ann Widdecombe possibly know how similar coronavirus is to Aids when even she would admit she knows nothing about either? Only recognised experts know the target domain (in this case, epidemiology) well enough to judge what source makes a good or bad metaphor. Populists just pull things out of thin air that feel right, regardless of their accuracy or utility. This is why popular science books are written by scientists, not populists, why popular economics books are written by economists, not populists, and so on.

“Understanding a thing,” according to Jaynes, “is arriving at a familiarising metaphor for it.” So if people are pushing duff metaphors on us, we’re going to misunderstand things – and as we’re seeing with Brexit, Trump, and especially coronavirus, the consequences of that can be grave.

What can you do about it? Well, the next time someone wheels one of these similes or metaphors or analogies, don’t let it pass. Ask them directly: in what respects is the EU like a dictatorship? When they inevitably fail to answer, point out the differences. Extend the analogy until it collapses under the weight of its own absurdity. Even if you can’t get through to them, you might just help prevent someone else who happens to be following the exchange from falling into the same deadly trap.

To finish on a more positive note, here’s how metaphors should be done. Kudos to @ptp335:

@ptp335: "Brexit is an underlying condition that none of the other nations has"

What we mean when we say ‘we’

‘We’ is a slippery little pronoun that can have any number of meanings – a fact that populist demagogues are gleefully exploiting

A world without pronouns would be a tedious one. “Bryan Fielding was an ordinary man. Bryan Fielding did not think of Bryan Fielding as an ordinary man, but Bryan Fielding most certainly was.” Pronouns save us time by avoiding the need to spell out the objects of our utterances in full at every mention.

But they can be slippery blighters.

When I use the word “I”, you have a pretty good idea of who I’m talking about. With a bit more context (where you are, who you’ve been talking about), the same goes for “he”, “she” and “they”. Minor confusions can arise in sentences like “When Sara kissed Barbara, she felt amazing”, but things are usually clear enough.

“You” is a trickier proposition. If I address a statement to “you”, I might be talking to you and you only, to you and others present, or to you and others of a group of which I consider you a member who are not present. Those who have studied foreign languages will know that while English lumps all these possibilities together, other tongues admit more distinctions: the French tu and vous, the German du and Sie.

But of all of personal pronouns, by far the biggest potential troublemaker is “we”.

Without any context, all you can be sure of when someone says “we” is that they mean “me, plus at least one other individual” (and even then you’ll still be wrong some of the time). This may or may not include any or all present; it may include only one other person, or it may stretch to every other human being who is living, has lived, or is yet to be born.

But the crucial ambiguity – and one that populist demagogues have gleefully exploited – is this: “we” may include or exclude the person being addressed.

Some examples to show you what I mean.

1. “We are not amused”

I’ll get two special cases out of the way first, as although they’re not especially relevant to my argument, they’re fascinating.

The “royal” we, meaning “I”, while associated most closely with Queen Victoria, has actually been with us for almost a millennium. Depending on who you believe, the first to use the word this way was either Henry II or Richard I, and its intended signification, apparently, was “God and I” – ie it was an attempt by the monarch to shore up his authority by claiming a “special relationship” with Him Upstairs.

It soon spread by contagion to anyone who overrated themselves – Margaret Thatcher was widely lambasted for her comment, “We have become a grandmother.”

2. “How are we feeling today?”

This “doctoral” we, also sometimes heard from carers of small children, actually means “you”. It’s a trick GPs, specialists and other “responsible adults” use to put the patient or child at ease from the off by creating a sense of affinity.

3. “What shall we do tonight?”

The most basic meaning of “we” is “the person speaking plus the person they are speaking to”, namely “me” and “you”.

4. “We are gathered here today …”

Ever since the first human ancestor ululated from a treetop, it’s been possible to address more than one individual at a time. Now, in the era of mass communication, you can talk to millions.

5. “Sorry we’re late”

The second simple meaning of “we”, again mostly restricted to real-life applications, has a radically different meaning from no 3: it’s “me, plus another person or persons, and explicitly not you”.

6. “We know from Godel’s second incompleteness theorem …”

The academic we, used in dissertations and other research literature, is frowned upon by most pointy-heads these days, precisely because it presupposes the reader’s agreement. “We” should strictly refer only to the authors of the study, not to “the scientific community” or “people in general”.

7. “We are destroying the planet”

What you might call the “Attenborough we”: generally taken to mean everyone; humanity as one monolithic mass. Can be extended to denote all humans past, present and future: “As a species, we do not know what our legacy to the universe will be.”

8. “We’re gonna win the league”

In the above cases, the referents of “we” are generally very clear (while the first two cases are a little odd, they are agreed by longstanding convention). There’s no potential disparity between who they actually mean when they say “we” and who you understand them to mean.

But now we’re entering murky territory. How can this 20-stone football fan, who hasn’t kicked a ball in anger since 1987 and whose sole contribution to match strategy has been to bellow “Useless wanker” at the team’s left-back, possibly claim any ownership of the on-field players’ success?

What he is signifying by “we” here is the team, or the club, that he supports, rather than himself and his Stella-swigging friends in the Fyffes End. He feels a connection to the club, even though his contribution is limited to a few hundred quid a year in season tickets and foul-mouthed support from the sidelines.

The club itself, assuming he hasn’t disgraced himself by throwing coins at the opposition goalkeeper, barely knows that he exists. But when that trophy comes home, he celebrates just as wildly as if he were the team’s veteran captain.

This is the chief appeal of tribalism: the ability to opt into and out of whatever aspects of membership you see fit. Your responsibilities within the tribe are minimal, and yet you feel able to take your share of the credit in the event of a victory.

9. “We won the war”

If you were a 95-year-old who served in the North African campaign, you might be justified in claiming a small part of the acclaim for Britain’s victory in the second world war (along with millions of Russians, Americans, Chinese, Indians, Poles, Aussies, Kiwis, French, etc). But as a fat middle-aged loser from Coventry who was born in 1963, you absolutely cannot.

What this old bigot means to be understood by “we”, of course, is all British people who have ever lived and will ever live. There is no such thing as an “innate British character” that you simply pick up by virtue of being born in these isles.

It also raises the question, how far back does Britishness go? To the Empire? To the Norman kings? To King Alfred? To Boudicca? And where do conscientious objectors, traitors, naturalised immigrants, and anti-Brexit liberals fit into your “we”?

Wars these days are fought on values, not nationalities. It’s difficult not to conclude that, were the same conditions of 1945 to emerge today, this old bigot would pick the other side.

10. “We don’t like strangers round here”

The speaker presumes to speak on behalf of all members of a group, when in fact their view may not be universal or even widespread.

There is undoubtedly a malicious element to this “confrontational we” – it is after all an attempt to intimidate by suggesting that the speaker has extensive support. But there may not necessarily be any deception involved; the speaker may well believe, correctly or not, that everyone else thinks the same way he does.

11. “We have a remain parliament”

Permavictim rentagob Chloe Westley of the TaxPayers’ Alliance has no such defence. When she says “we” here, she wants Brexit voters to believe that she is on their side. For one thing, she’s Australian, so not even part of the group she claims membership of. For another, she’s paid by US corporations to spread falsehoods in order to secure a damaging no-deal Brexit that will actively harm British citizens and facilitate the sell-off of public services and the quashing of workers’ rights and environmental protections, all to swell the coffers of the Koch brothers.

12. “We voted out”

An intimidatory “we” similar to No 10, and a favoured tool of the Brexit voter. There’s a huge and important disjunction here between who the speaker intends us to picture, and who they actually mean. In this case, the intent is to give the impression that the United Kingdom voted as one unit to leave the European Union, when in reality, only 17.4 million people, or 26% of the population, did.

Just under a quarter of the population voted for the exact opposite outcome, and the remaining half voted for nothing at all (which you could legitimately interpret as a passive vote for the status quo). Furthermore, 3 million EU citizens and a sizeable number of the 1.5 million British migrants to the EU were denied a voice.

(The phrase “the people” is often used in the same misleading fashion: “the will of the people”, “the people have spoken”, “enemies of the people”.)

But this “we” falls apart at the slightest scrutiny. As long as your collective aims are nice and broad and vague, you can muster quite a lot of “us” in support of them. But as soon as you try to narrow down those aims to specific course of action, the illusion of unity vanishes and your following splinters – as we are now seeing with the various warring Brexit factions.

“What do we want?”
“Change!”
“When do we want it?”
“Now!”
“What specific changes do we want to make?”
“Well, Parvinder favours option A. Sally prefers option B, which is completely incompatible with option A, and Keith doesn’t really have any ideas. He’s just cranky.”

13. “Let’s take back control”

The “we” is rather buried, in the form of that apostrophe+s, in Vote Leave’s ingenious and probably decisive slogan for the 2016 referendum campaign, but it’s crucial.

Almost three years after the vote, no Brexit campaigner has yet been able to explain how leaving the EU will restore any control to the average person in the street. The truth is, the only beneficiaries of the change will be whoever is in power at Westminster and, some way down the line, the big businesses that lobby them.

And they will benefit precisely at the expense of the average person in the street, whose rights and protections they will be free to curtail once the UK leaves the European Union. The slogan is a ruthlessly cynical exploitation of the ambiguity of the word “we”. It implies everyone in the UK; in fact it means only a very small subset of that group.

Dominic Cummings and his fellow cacodemons were essentially trying to pull the same trick as your GP – but with far less benevolent intent. In return for nothing more than putting a cross in a box, they seemed to promise, you could become part of a project, a team, a family. You’ll feel valued again! And that family will go on to achieve untold glories, that you can share in!

Alas, the bitter truth for Brexiters is the same as for the football fan: while you may experience the elation of vicarious victory, it’ll cost you a small fortune, and you won’t so much as lay a finger on that trophy.

Cummings, Johnson, Rees-Mogg, Westley et al can say “we” till they’re blue in the face – but know this: you, the common person, are not and never will be part of their club.

Swarms, red tape and shackles: deciphering the Brexit code

The Leave campaign won chiefly by lying and cheating – but also through the cunning manipulation of metaphors

You may have heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: the theory that language determines thought. Benjamin Whorf, building on the work of Edmund Sapir, suggested in his 1940 essay Science and Linguistics that what and how we think are at least partly shaped by the words and grammar that we use to conceive and express those thoughts. (Whorf’s preferred term for the theory was “Linguistic Relativity”.)

He reached his conclusion after noticing huge systemic differences between languages: how different peoples divided up the colour spectrum in different ways; how the Hopi language lacked a word for time, or any recognisable tenses; how Eskimo languages had multiple words for snow.

The idea was revolutionary, hugely popular, and ever so slightly racist. Could our perception – and therefore our behaviour – really be determined by the place we were born? By the 1960s, however, after a number of rebuttals, the hypothesis, in its strong form at least, had fallen out of favour. How could form really affect content? Surely, even if your language doesn’t have a word for a particular colour, you can still perceptually tell the difference?

***

All my life, I’ve loved language. Like Stephen Fry (but not as well as Stephen Fry), I’ve savoured it, sploshed in it, flossed with it and galoshed in it. I kept my first diary at seven. I was writing stories at 11, scripts at 13, and soon studying English, German, French and Spanish. At university, I dipped into Hopi, Swahili and Inuktitut (and Whorf). And as an adult, virtually every penny I’ve earned has come either from writing, or from editing other people’s writing.

And all this time, I never considered language to be that important. Ultimately, while it was a useful tool, a fascinating area of study, an enjoyable way to earn a crust and a handy icebreaker at parties, it didn’t butter many parsnips. It was a passion that paid the bills.

But the events of the last couple of years have prompted a rethink. Seismic changes in the political climate and public mood have been engineered in the blink of an eye – and language, particularly as used in mass media, seems to have been one of the main vectors of this change. Perhaps Mr Whorf wasn’t so far off the mark after all.

***

Whatever else you think about the people who are dragging the UK out of the European Union, some of their wordsmithery has been astute. While most have relied on untruths and logical fallacies, subtler tricks have also played a part.

The peerlessly sinister MP Steve Baker engineered the wording of the EU referendum, persuading David Cameron to change a YES/NO vote to LEAVE/REMAIN. (“Yes” tends to attract more votes from the undecided because of its positive overtones; meanwhile, “Leave” is muscular, active and Anglo-Saxon, while “remain” is languid, passive and Latinate.) And we know that it was charmless Jack Skellington clone Dominic Cummings, the director of Vote Leave, who came up with the viscerally appealing but meaningless slogan “Take back control”. And the use of terms like “swarms” and “cockroaches” by the likes of Katie Hopkins and the Daily Mail to describe refugees entering Europe is well documented.

The turns of phrase used by the Brexit mob are deliberately selected to provoke an emotional, rather than a rational response. “You’re being attacked!” they bellow, or “You’re being held prisoner!” This triggers the fear centres in the brain and bypasses the rational circuits. Because all rational circuits conclude that the better course of action is remain in the EU.

Here are a few instances of linguistic chicanery that have become far too deeply embedded in far too many consciousnesses.

Protectionist

One spurious argument you’ll hear quite often from Brexit diehards is that the EU is protectionist; that it discriminates against non-member nations by imposing tariffs on their goods but not on those of member states.

They have, of course, got things (deliberately?) arse about face. Before the EU, tariffs and non-tariff barriers applied to all trades between all nations. The EU was created precisely to abolish those barriers, but obviously only for those who signed up, paid their dues and contributed to the legwork. In any case, these benefits don’t just apply to EU members; the Union has agreements in place with 47 countries or trading blocs which drastically reduce the impediments to trade, with many more in the pipeline.

In leaving the EU and withdrawing from all these treaties, it is the UK that becomes the protectionist, isolationist party. A bold few are advocating that the UK should unilaterally drop all its tariffs, but there are no end of potential hazards to this, not least the fact that a) there is no guarantee that other countries will reciprocate, and b) such a move would flood the market with cheap foreign produce and inevitably destroy British manufacturing and agriculture.

Red tape

One of the earliest of the Brexit mob’s clarion calls. “We need to slash all this EU red tape!” they wailed. “It’s strangling British business!” Of course, what they mean by “red tape” more often than not is regulations that benefit consumers and workers: safety standards, consumer protections, workers’ rights and environmental safeguards. The only people this red tape is “strangling” – or, to put it more clearly, “denting the profits of” – are megarich CEOs and shareholders.

Dictatorship

As absurd as it may sound, this is probably the Brexit fanatics’ most popular way of describing the European Union. For their benefit, let’s compare concept and the metaphor and see how apt the comparison is.

A dictatorship is defined by most dictionaries as “a government by a ruler with absolute power, typically one who has taken power by force”. Britannica elaborates: “Dictators usually … maintain power through the use of intimidation, terror, and the suppression of basic civil liberties. They may also employ techniques of mass propaganda.”

The imagery falls down on every count. The EU does not have anything close to total power over its members; it is concerned largely with trade, agriculture and the environment. Defence, taxation, welfare, education and healthcare all fall within the purview of individual states. Moreover, member states have a say in those laws (and the UK has been disproportionately successful in this regard). The EU did not seize power in a coup, it does not intimidate or terrorise, and no one has had any rights removed. In fact, British people enjoy more rights and protections as a result of EU membership than they otherwise would.

Shackles

Of all the Brexiters’ misleading metaphors, “EU shackles” has undoubtedly gained the most traction. I see it dozens of times every day. But how exactly does EU membership resemble a pair of fetters connected by a chain used to bind prisoner’s legs together?

The UK’s relationship with the EU is a bond, but it is one that was entered into voluntarily.
It is a bond of friendship and cooperation, not one of indenture or servitude.
It is also one that the UK can leave of its own accord. Sure, leaving is a complex matter, because we’ve spent 45 years integrating our economy with 27 other countries’, but no great feat of escapology is required.
It is a mutually advantageous agreement, not one designed to restrain or oppress one party.
It grants both parties more freedom (of movement, of trade, lower prices, simpler travel, worker protections), not less. It doesn’t prevent us from doing anything that we wouldn’t otherwise have to do ourselves. 55% of the UK’s trade is already with the rest of the world, and Germany, for example, does plenty of importing from and exporting to other countries.

Alas, this tiresome pairing is now imprinted on millions of impressionable minds, and undoing it will require the work of generations, or at least several years of penury and global humiliation.

Other commonly used terms that feed into this fraudulent narrative of subjugation and freedom include colony, vassal state, yoke, escape the clutches, independence and, of course, betrayal.

Freedom of movement

There was one big obstacle to the Brexiters’ messaging plans. They had banged the immigration drum so loudly during the campaign that when they won, they had no choice but to deliver on it – by ending freedom of movement. But when you’re running on a platform of “emancipation from oppression”, how on earth do you sell the removal of people’s freedom to travel, study, work and retire across 31 countries?

Their solution, as ever, was to turn things on their head. So you’ll rarely hear Brexit supporters talking sheepishly about taking away your freedom of movement (except the staggeringly inept, like Jeremy Corbyn). Instead, they will rhapsodise about how we are gaining control of our borders. Never mind that the UK already has control of its borders – it’s going to gain even more luvverly control over them!

When they are not twisting words and metaphors for their own nefarious purposes, of course, the Brexit wrecking crew are twisting the words of Remain campaigners in an attempt to undermine their validity. The outstanding instance of this was Boris Johnson’s shameless reductio ad absurdum of David Cameron’s point about 70 years of peace in Europe, but it happens on a daily basis. Any attempt to point out that the vast majority of Muslims are peace-loving people, for example, is met with a murderous “You defend terrorists! You love paedophiles!”

I don’t have the space here to begin on Donald Trump’s linguistic abuses, except to note that while his misrepresentations are considerably less sophisticated, they appear to have been no less successful. Might may not make right, but shite certainly seems to.

People armed with enough time and enough critical thinking skills can generally see through these cheap conjuring tricks. The trouble is, in this era of instant gratification and limitless diversion, that’s a rapidly dwindling band. Meanwhile, a growing number of people who cannot (or will not, because the message resonates with their animal fears) question the platitudes that feed their lizard-brain’s fears are fortified, emboldened by them, and ever more convinced of their righteousness.

***

How do you fight back against this? I welcome all suggestions, because the only plan I have right now sounds far too much like hard work. Call this language out wherever you see it. Challenge people to justify their metaphors. Exactly how the UK’s relationship with the European Union like a shackle? “Protectionist”? You mean, abolished all barriers to trade with its partners? Copy and paste in the dictionary definition of the chosen metaphor, to highlight the absurdity of their point.

And let’s hope that we get through to enough people to prove Benjamin Whorf wrong, and reverse the catastrophe of Brexit before it’s too late.

For more examples of semantic skulduggery, check out the Dictionary of Brexitese – the bespoke dialect of English developed by the far right to mislead the easily misled.

The new age of unreason

In our new reality, the views of a West Ham fan who left school at 15 are deemed as valid as those of a politics professor at LSE

(Fair warning: there’s a lot of ground to cover on this subject, so this will be the first in a mini-series.)

In 415AD, a band of thugs dragged the mathematician, astronomer and Neoplatonist philosopher Hypatia from her carriage and took her to a nearby church, where they stripped her naked, battered her to death with roof tiles, dismembered her and set the body parts on fire.

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, the majority of the 200,000 Spanish civilians killed were members of the intelligentsia, as were most of the victims of the “killing fields” of Cambodia in the late 1970s. In the months after the invasion of Poland that triggered the second world war, the Nazis captured and killed around 100,000 Poles, 61,000 of whom were academics, priests, lawyers and doctors, in a secret cleansing operation codenamed Intelligenzaktion.

On his accession to power in Iran in 1979, the Ayatollah Khomeini closed all universities and either executed or drove out most of the country’s intellectuals. In 2001, the Taliban planted and detonated explosives to destroy the Buddhas of Bamiyan, giant sandstone sculptures in the Hazarajat region of Afghanistan dating from the 6th century.

And in a history lesson at Ridgeway School in Swindon in 1982, Gavin McCracken pulled a wad of mucus from his nostril, rolled the sticky residue into a ball, and flicked it at the back of Andy Bodle’s head after the latter raised his hand to answer the teacher’s question.

All right, so it’s not exactly the martyrdom of Hypatia, but there’s a direct line connecting 5th-century Alexandria to Gavin McCracken’s bogie. Humanity has a long and inglorious history of persecuting its brighter minds and vandalising its culture, and if the last couple of years are any guide, it’s far from done yet.

“You know, I’ve always wanted to say this – I’ve never said this before – with all the talking we all do, all of these experts, ‘Oh we need an expert’ – the experts are terrible!” – Donald Trump, Wisconsin campaign rally, April 2016

Once again it has become fashionable, particularly on the right, to call expert opinion into question, to criticise judges and academics as “out of touch”, and to prize “real men” and “common sense” over rational inquiry. Suddenly, after years of rational debate, climate change deniers are back on an equal footing with climate scientists. Michael Gove is blithely declaring that we’ve “had enough of experts”.

And a serving British MP thinks this is a perfectly reasonable reply to an economist on Twitter:

Marcus Fysh tweet — Bah, facts. Who needs ’em?

It seems at first sight that in the space of a few short months, someone – this is not the place to speculate as to who – has begun to shape a reality in which “overeducated” is routinely deployed as a term of abuse, in which the complexity of a trade arrangement is considered sufficient grounds for binning it, and in which the views of a West Ham fan who left school at 15 are deemed as valid as those of a politics professor at LSE.

After years of relative peace, harmony and prosperity, a good chunk of the populace suddenly seems hellbent on dragging us back to the Byzantine era. But is this really an overnight development?

In his Pulitzer-winning book Anti-Intellectualism in American Life, historian Richard Hofstadter charts the history of the relationship between his country and its intellectual class. For Hofstadter, writing in 1963, the most recent outbreak of boffin-bashing was the period of 1947-56, when the erudite Democrat Adlai Stevenson lost out twice to man-of-action Dwight Eisenhower in the presidential elections, and Joseph McCarthy’s Communist hysteria was at its vindictive height.

Hofstadter concludes that backlashes against the highly educated are cyclical, usually coming when times are economically or otherwise tough, after extended periods of liberal governance, and usually led by the church, business interests, and those on the right of the political spectrum. (I’ll be returning to Hofstadter a lot, as the parallels between what he describes and our present troubles are consistently alarming.)

Hofstadter’s focus was exclusively on the US, through the lenses of politics, business, religion and education. One area he didn’t really touch on was language, which turns out to be just as enlightening.

Insults for the intelligent have always been with us – “know-it-all”, “clever clogs”, “smart alec”, “swot” – but the end of the second world war and the start of the cold war saw a veritable deluge of new terms. “Square”, in the sense of “boringly old-fashioned or conventional person”, which soon morphed into a synonym for “swot”, is first attested in 1944. “Boffin” arrived in 1945. These were swiftly followed by “geek” (1946), “nerd” (1951), “dork” (1967), “dweeb” and “pointy-headed” (1968) and “anorak” (1984). “Egghead” seems to have been coined around 1907, but only really gained currency in the early 50s.

It’s true that some of these slurs have lost their force over time, some have been at least partially reclaimed (geek, nerd), and others (“pointy-headed”) have disappeared altogether. Nonetheless, those who once might have reached for a word to torment their diligent classmates with are now spoilt for choice.

We’re already beyond ideal blog post length, so I’ll pause here. That’s some of the background to emergence of this brave, stupid new world. In the next few posts, I’ll consider how this came about, why it came about, what the enemies of reason propose to replace it with, and whether there’s anything we can do about it.

A dictionary of Brexitese

A beginner’s guide to the UK’s newest language – a fascinating creole of English and bullshit

Until recently, there were 11 native languages in the United Kingdom: English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, Cornish, Angloromani, Scottish Gaelic, Shelta, British Sign Language, Irish Sign Language and Northern Ireland Sign Language. But some time in early 2016, a 12th tongue sprang forth.

Brexitese, at present attested for the most part only in written form, is superficially similar to standard English. Its grammar is identical (if simplified), and it draws on the same word pool. However, the Brexitese rules of punctuation are looser, and it has a far smaller vocabulary, to the extent that its users often have to support their text with cry emojis. Words of more than two syllables are generally shunned altogether.

The most striking feature, and the most problematic for learners of the fledgling tongue, is that the meanings of many Brexitese words differ slightly – sometimes markedly – from their standard English equivalents.

Here, then, for the benefit of those who wish to properly comprehend our isolationist brethren, I shall be compiling a brief guide to the most common of these linguistic “false friends”.

Democracy

English meaning: System of government under which a governing body, elected by the people as their representatives and advised and assisted by a civil service with the relevant expertise, takes decisions regarding the laws of the land. In a properly functioning democracy, these representatives are selected through free and fair elections, the citizens should participate actively in politics and civic life, the human rights of citizens should be protected, and the rule of law should apply equally to all citizens. Also known as parliamentary democracy.

Brexitese meaning: System of government, long since abandoned by most civilised societies, under which the people themselves take decisions on matters about which they do not have the first fucking clue. Votes need neither be free nor fair, and the human rights of millions of those affected by those votes can be trampled on whenever the winners see fit. Aka ochlocracy.

Examples: “You hate democracy”; “Stop trying to overturn democracy”.

Politically correct

English meaning: Taking care not to offend or further marginalise already marginalised groups, such as ethnic subgroups, disabled people, LGBT groups, women, and the adherents of certain religions; making an effort to accommodate the needs of minorities; showing consideration.

Brexitese meaning: Actively destroying the fabric of society.

Shackle

English meaning: A pair of fetters connected by a chain used to bind a captive’s legs together.

Brexitese meaning: Commitments voluntarily entered into by treaty; bonds of friendship.

Red tape

English meaning: Excessive bureaucracy or adherence to official rules and formalities.

Brexitese meaning: Laws guaranteeing workers’ rights, basic safety standards and environmental safeguards.

Example: “Our businesses will only thrive when they are free of EU red tape!”

Dictatorship

English meaning: Form of government under which one person, or one small group of people, retains absolute power over a nation, with no or few constitutional limitations. Generally characterised by corruption, the extensive use of propaganda, the suppression of basic civil liberties, and the imprisonment, exile or violent removal of dissenters.

Brexitese meaning: Voluntary partnership with a prosperous trading bloc, which also happens to handle some of the smaller, administrative apparatuses of state. Constitutional limitations all over the shop, none of which can be altered without the consent of all member states. Characterised by tolerance, mutual understanding, compromise, and a commitment to upholding civil liberties.

Example: “We’ve had enough of this EU dictatorship!”

Expert

English meaning: A person who is highly knowledgeable about, or very skilful in, a particular area.

Brexitese meaning: A complete idiot who, despite having trained extensively in his or her chosen discipline, makes assessments and predictions that are wrong 100% of the time.

Example: “We’ve had enough of experts!”

Socialism

English meaning: Any of various economic and political theories advocating collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution of goods.

Brexitese meaning: Any system of government – but particularly violently oppressive ones – that happen to have used the word “socialism” in their name, however disingenuously.

Example: “The Nazis weren’t rightwing, they were socialists!”

Mandate

English meaning: The authority, granted by the electorate to a party or candidate that wins a vote, to carry out a policy explicitly spelled out before that vote.

Brexitese meaning: The authority to do anything the winners of an election want, regardless of what was voted on.

Example: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?” 52%: “Leave the European Union.” Brexiters: “Great, this means we have a mandate to leave the EEA, EFTA, the single market, the customs union, Euratom, Horizon 2020, Erasmus, and the jurisdiction of the ECJ.”

Sovereignty

English meaning: The authority of a state to govern itself or another state; freedom from external influence.

Brexitese meaning: Precise definition unclear – no Brexit speaker has ever been able to give an example of how leaving the EU will increase Britain’s sovereignty – but saying it seems to make them feel a lot better. An interjection, perhaps?

Great

English meaning: 1. Of an extent, amount, or intensity considerably above average. 2. Impressive or grand.

Brexitese meaning: The way things used to be, or, at least, how I remember them being, when I was young and carefree and people still wanted to have sex with me.

Example: “Make Britain great again!”

Freedom of speech

English meaning: The legal right to broadcast one’s views or feelings freely. (Very few societies permit total freedom of speech – not even the US, which has restrictions on the expression of obscenity, child pornography, defamation, incitement to violence and true threats of violence.)

Brexitese meaning: My right to broadcast my feelings. Especially the offensive ones. You lost, so you have to shut up, for ever.

Will of the people

English meaning: The overwhelming consensus of opinion among the body of a population.

Brexitese meaning: The unspecified ramifications of one poorly informed decision, made one day more than 18 months ago, by 27% of the population, many of whom only did so as a protest vote. In English, we would render this “The whim of a quarter of the people.”

Enemy of the people

English meaning: One who acts against the interests of his nation and/or his countrymen, typically by violent means.

Brexitese meaning: Anyone who expresses even the tiniest doubt about the wisdom of dragging a country out of the world’s richest trading bloc for no good reason. Examples include judges, young people, liberals, scientists, economists, actors, philosophers, “metropolitan elites”, and 16.1 million Remain voters.

Traitor

English meaning: A person who betrays someone or something, such as a friend, cause, or principle.

Brexitese meaning: Anyone who has the temerity to use facts, reason and evidence in an argument, instead of blind emotion.

Unelected

English meaning: In office not as a result of a popular vote, but by another means, such as interview, test, examination, or competition.

Brexitese meaning: Wrong.

Lie

English meaning: A false statement made by someone who knows it to be false; a deliberate attempt to mislead.

Brexitese meaning: A prediction made in good faith in order to dissuade someone from pursuing a dangerous course of action.

Example: “But Remain lied too! Instant recession, austerity budget, world war three …”

Cockroach

English meaning: Any of about 4,600 species of primitive living winged insects, resembling broad, flattened beetles, generally nocturnal and considered domestic pests.

Brexitese meaning: A human being fleeing its home country because its life is in danger, because of war, famine or persecution.

Independent

English meaning: Not requiring or relying on others (for care or livelihood).

Brexitese meaning: Having no treaties or agreements with other nations; isolated and vulnerable.

Triggered

English meaning: Brought about, caused.

Brexitese meaning: Reduced to tears or powerless rage; extremely distressed. Used as a spurious claim of victory by teenagers and man-babies on the internet whenever an intentionally offensive message elicits any sort of response.

Example:

Spooky action at a distance

Words are the clothes we wear in the virtual world. And in the past year, they’ve helped me make some of my firmest friends

Margaret Sullavan and James Stewart in The Shop Around The Corner (exactly a zillion times better than You’ve Got Mail)

Can you love someone you’ve never met? Search engine says no:

A trawl of the net suggests this is the majority view. Human beings, after all, engage with the world and each other via their senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, smell (and at least four others, according to my QI Book of General Ignorance). All entail close proximity.

Besides, the internet is groaning with stories of how “I fell in love online but then we met in real life and he turned out to be 90/a ring-tailed lemur/a twat”. Love can only be real if you can be certain that the person is real, right?

Why, then, do literature and film offer so many tales of incorporeal love? Les Liaisons Dangereuses is a series of seductions by letter; ditto Rousseau’s La Nouvelle Héloïse. In Cyrano de Bergerac, Roxane is won over by the words of Cyrano (delivered by the oafish mouth of Christian). In Miklós László’s 1937 play Illatszertár – better known to most in the form of the 1940 Sullavan/Stewart romcom The Shop Around The Corner and the DEAR GOD WHY 1998 Hanks/Ryan remake, You’ve Got Mail – George and Amalia, two feuding employees in a Budapest gift shop, are each engaged in a romantic correspondence with a stranger. The twist, of course, is that they’re pen-fucking each other.

Steve Martin lusts after a cerebellum in a jar in The Man With Two Brains. Joaquin Phoenix goes all googly for a virtual assistant in Her (which I don’t quite buy, because while the idea of a woman who obeys your every whim and never complains is vaguely appealing, the idea of a partner who knows everything is not). And Beauty and the Beast and the Frog Prince are just two of countless fairy tales dealing with people falling for the intangible essence of a person rather than their physical self.

These are all fictions, but they are fictions that resonate, because we like to think that, deep down, we’re not shallow, and that we can love a person for their soul rather than their superficial, transient features.

In any case, it’s not as if remote romancin’ is a new phenomenon in the real world. Thanks to the social taboos around spending time alone with unmarried members of the opposite sex, love letters formed the greater part of the courtship process for centuries. Mozart and Constanza Weber, John Keats and Fanny Brawne, and Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are just three of the more famous examples of loves forged or fortified in ink.

And because many countries (including the “civilised” western ones) have a long tradition of arranging marriages*, it’s long been common for people to have little direct contact before committing to each other. Here again, correspondence is encouraged: soul 2 soul > hole 2 hole. What’s more, it seems to work: the reported happiness within, and survival rate of, arranged marriages is considerably higher than that in modern “voluntary” ones.

(*As distinct from forcing them, of course.)

People have been holding torches for faraway souls – royalty, soldiers, actors, writers, Tannoy announcers – for as long as they’ve had imaginations, and the absent can get to you just as effectively as the present. This poor woman was so deeply affected by someone she met online that she ended up being prescribed the anti-anxiety drug Ativan.

***

The secret to this spooky action at a distance, of course, is humanity’s tour de force: language. With words, you can create a representation of yourself that is not confined to one point in space or time.

Some scoff at the idea that Russian- or Robert Mercer-sponsored Twitterbots and targeted Facebook ads might have influenced the EU referendum result and Donald Trump’s victory. To them, I mention only that half the human race still allow their every waking moment to be governed by diktats set down in books written 2,000 and 1,400 years ago.

Words are the clothes we wear in unreality. You don’t (often) get to make them, but you get to choose them, and how to combine them, and the “richer” you are, the wider the options open to you. With time, a spellcheck, maybe even a friend’s judicious eye, you can step out into the virtual world as if fresh from a Gok Wan makeover.

As the very existence of the field of forensic linguistics proves, your use of language is as unique to you as your fingerprint (assuming you’re not a copy-and-pasting Brexit fanatic). Your language reveals everything important about you: your values, your interests, your sense of humour, your level of education, and usually, despite your best efforts at airbrushing, your attitude to the world.

And it was precisely the discovery that others shared my values and humour that, over the last few months, brought together one of the most cherished groups of people I’ve been part of.

For me, it’s been the sole silver lining to Brexit. After bonding on Twitter over the inanities of the far right, a few of us started a chat with a view to meeting up at the March for Europe in London in March 2017. Only a handful made it, and we didn’t actually hang out for that long, but the chat chuntered on, and slowly, as we found more like-minded souls, we added them. Boys and girls, straight and bi, from Manchester to South Africa to Moscow, liberal and anti-fascist, mostly of a similar age (with me as extreme outlier).

There have been six or seven meet-ups now. Drinks on general election night were followed by an Ethiopian meal, then a canalboat cruise, then an eggs benedict sleepover. Geographical distribution means I haven’t met them all yet, but I’ve checked off about half the group in six months.

But like I said, screw the real-world stuff. Mostly we talk shit. We share pictures and jokes and tweets that we love, as most groups do, but we also flirt, sympathise, praise, share intelligence on Nazis, and sometimes get wasted and stay up all night playing Twitter Countdown. Oh, and because we’re all snowflakes that melt at any temperature above -272C, the slightest ill-considered comment can send any of us hurtling out of the group, only to return after three days or so of grovelling and cajoling.

In what’s been an exceptionally difficult year for me, thanks to some serious health problems, the Tits have been an endless source of support, fascination and joy (and grief, but nothing comes without a price). Less spooky action at a distance, more strong nuclear force.

***

The argument that virtual interactions are plainly inferior to real weakens with every passing day. The ability to share pictures, audio and video has already narrowed the perceptual distance between us, and as the functionality of social media is slowly engineered to replicate real-world interaction (Facebook and Twitter likes are nods and smiles; retweets and shares are laughs; gifs, I guess, are goofy facial expressions), so our online and real-world experiences fall into ever closer step.

You can’t entirely trust those visual and auditory signals, of course – catfishing is a real problem – and you still don’t get any hormonal chemistry online, one of the principal components of attraction.

Well, not directly. Recent studies have shown that getting likes and retweets from an online crush can cause a similar spike in the “love hormone” to that caused by physical contact. How fucked up is that? A little character appears on your phone, as a result of someone you’ve never met typing something into their phone a thousand miles away, and causes an actual chemical change in your brain! People can change your mood, and your mind, and your heart, from afar.

Then of course there are the aspects of remote relationships that are superior to their physical equivalents. Objectivity. Disinhibition. Novelty. The thrill of the not-quite-known.

In fact, if I ruled the world, I might insist that all future human relationships be conducted on a virtual basis. Because based on my record, I’m better off keeping the flesh well out of it. I might have a shot at charming your pants off from 500 paces, but move me 499 paces closer and chances are I’ll just soil my own.

People are, after all, just an idea, even when they’re in your arms. Sure, your proximate senses give you a firmer grip on that idea, but ultimately, you have no way of knowing for sure whether they are real, whether the sensations in your fingertips haven’t just been planted there by some malign entity. You might be living in the Matrix.

Meanings change fast. We use the word “virtual” these days in opposition to the word “real”, forgetting that until very recently its only sense was “almost or nearly as described”, ie pretty much as good as the real thing. I’d argue that before long, its semantics might morph again, so that it comes to mean “better than the real thing”.

“Hold up, Bodle!” you cry, smirking. “This is all very well, but you’ve missed out one crucial element. If you never meet someone, you can’t have sex with them.”

Ha, yeah! I used to think that too.