It is a great disappointment to me that my phrases don’t get picked up by other writers and then society in general before ending up in the Oxford English Dictionary. Chuck Palahniuk is credited with the use of ‘snowflake’ as a pejorative term, for example, and James Bartholomew claims (despite some evidence to the contrary) to have made up ‘virtue-signalling’. Both are now very familiar and even overused — but mine all get ignored.
I came up with what I thought was a decent neologism while being interviewed by Peter Whittle for his programme So What You’re Saying Is… Peter had been lamenting, as we all do, the endless hierarchy of acquired or claimed victimhoods by people possessing one or another ‘protected characteristic’ and suggested that this could only get worse in the future. I disagreed and told him that I thought we had at last reached ‘peak wank’.
Peak wank is the stage at which society finally says enough is enough, when the intersectional argument breaks down under the weight of its own manifest contradictions and we all cleave instead to a notion of the world as it is, rather than pretending to inhabit a fairy tale concocted by a post-Marxist village idiot.
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