The roots of Labour’s bigotry

Another word which has gained a new meaning in the present decade, along with ‘vulnerable’ and ‘diverse’: survivor. Once it meant a person who had been transported to Auschwitz but somehow came out alive. Or a person who had been involved in a terrible car crash but had escaped with only a broken neck. Today it means someone whose nipple was perhaps gently tweaked by a light entertainment star 40 years ago. Or someone who was mildly and almost certainly justifiably bullied at school.

I’m also getting a little weary of the elephant in the room. It has become for me, when talking about transformative grammar, the elephant in the room. I heard a woman on Radio 4 say: ‘Well, the thing is, Sarah, there are so many elephants in the room.’ More elephants in the room than there are in the wild, I suspect.

The woman had made reference to the hidden pachyderms while lecturing us all about some form of discrimination I hadn’t previously known existed.