The transgender agenda is collapsing

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. I had high hopes for peak wank: OED neologism of the year for the 2020 edition, I reckoned. ‘Peak wank/Pi:k waenk/. N. A tipping point in society when it can abide no longer the egregious ejaculate being deposited on it by the cretinous left.(R. Liddle 2019.)’ But this is highly unlikely: it has died a death. I rather hoped our own Charles Moore, a great ally, might have used it during his recent Question Time appearance, just to get the phrase out there. Nope. I bet if Carlyle or Burke had coined peak wank, Charles would have used it.