Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Why has the word ‘grandmother’ been banned by the Guardian?

Rod Liddle analyses the extraordinary list of mostly harmless words and phrases that are now considered inappropriate by one of our leading national newspapers

issue 04 October 2008

There are too few active homosexuals and career women in the Third World. This is because blacks and Asians — from Australasia to Bangalore — have a tendency to put them in a pot, cook them and eat them. Primitive African tribes also eat crippled people — those in a wheelchair, or merely suffering from a hare lip — and indeed those they consider to be ethnic minorities. I know of one handicapped spinster who committed suicide rather than be eaten by some gypsies in Bombay. Her illegitimate daughter, an air hostess, who herself had given birth to Siamese twins in Calcutta, appealed for clemency but this fell on deaf ears. She is now an illegal asylum seeker living in the province of Northern Ireland — and a grandmother to boot, with a bachelor son.

Oh, enough, enough. I had intended to work my way through the entire book, but that will do for now.

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