My husband is constantly amused by talk of patient autonomy — for people who want to have a limb lopped off to solve their feeling of body dysmorphia and so on. I suppose he is amused because that is his nature, rather than that these things are inherently funny. In any case, as I have told him more than once, he is himself an example of impatient autonomy.
There was great talk of autonomy in the debate on Lord Falconer’s Assisted Dying Bill. The learned Lord Brennan pointed out that, if it is passed, ‘Litigants will say to the court, “I want to exercise my autonomy and my choice. Why is it restricted to the terminally ill?” ’ Thus the word becomes a banner to wave, like those off-the-peg placards at teachers’ rallies printed with the name of the Socialist Workers Party, which must annoy even some of those teachers by lacking an apostrophe.
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