Yet more derangement around rape

It is more than three years since the town of Tisdale, Saskatchewan, decided to ditch its motto ‘Land of Rape and Honey’. That was how the prairie outpost had been known for 60 years, a consequence of the large amounts of canola produced in the region and the fact that they have lots of bees. But the town authorities now thought the slogan had a certain ominous, menacing air to it, so they replaced it with ‘Tisdale — Opportunity Grows Here’, which is entirely lacking in threat, interest and anything else you care to mention.

A year later the supermarket store Aldi was forced to change the name of a paint it was promoting from ‘Rape yellow’ to something else — probably ‘Bright yellow’, I don’t know. Sexual abuse campaigners had been outraged, you see, and apparently unable to accept that a word can have two meanings.

You can tell when an issue has been dangerously politicised by the screeching that arises whenever its name is mentioned, when people think they have ownership of the word and thus the narrative and you are not allowed to mention it any more, not even if you are referring to a noisome brassica related to the turnip, or rapum as it is known in Latin.