‘Come on, old girl,’ said my husband as though encouraging a cow stuck in a ditch, ‘you must know.’ It was because I’d asked him in the far-off days of last week what woman meant, just after Rishi Sunak had said: ‘We must be able to call a mother a mother.’ Penny Mordaunt, Liz Truss and Kemi Badenoch then tussled in a hate-crime triangle on television over who said what, when about people self-identifying in a gender.
Such matters are said to belong to culture wars, which we had thought an American phenomenon. Culture wars acquired their name only in the 1980s. Since then we have grown used to language (as part of their armaments) changing rapidly. Politically incorrect began as something assumed bad; then politically correct became a shorthand for the false and absurd. Politically correct was overtaken by woke.
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