Turd

I have never lost my admiration for Boris Johnson’s summary of British ambitions over Brexit as ‘having our cake and eating it’. It taught a generation of EU bureaucrats an important English idiom.

So it is with renewed admiration, if involuntary distaste, that I regard his success in reintroducing turd into polite conversation. It has been used openly on Radio 4 at breakfast-time, ever since Mr Johnson was reported to have remarked during the Chequers cabinet meeting (or kidnapping) that defending the Brexit plan would be like ‘polishing a turd’. The Oxford English Dictionary gives the proverb ‘You can’t polish a turd’, comparing it to ‘You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear’. Turd polishing is found no earlier than 1976 and is not to be confused with turd packing, a homophobic term. But I am sorry to report that turds have played a large part in proverbial lore for centuries, always fairly disgustingly.