22/04/2016
I am occasionally taken to task for my use of language on this blog and elsewhere, not for our expletives as we tend to avoid those but for the more colourful epithets such as "moron" and "idiot" - with suggestions that we are "undermining" the campaign when we apply them to certain people.
For all that, when we last did a quantitative study, we found that our resort to these terms was
relatively modest, although we have tended to be quite free in our use of the word "moron" in relation to one
particular man.
And up pops this same man again,
Aleaxander (aka Boris) Johnson, at one representing the "leave" campaign while, on the other delivering an unadorned "racist" slur against President Obama.
For sure, this is not a man at the height of his popularity in the "leave" camp, but for high level representatives of the campaign, that still suggests a certain amount of caution in one's writings.
Yet here Johnson goes again, writing for
The Sun, retailing
a four-year-old urban legend about the removal of a Churchill bust from the White House. Johnson alludes to this fictitious event that has been
comprehensively debunked and then relates it to unsourced suggestions that it was "a symbol of the part-Kenyan President's ancestral dislike of the British empire".
And despite Vote Leave being rapped over the knuckles for its "
potentially misleading" use of statistics on savings from leaving the EU, Johnson also trots out the spurious claim that we are "giving £20 billion a year, or £350 million a week, to Brussels".
No doubt, under the circumstances, there are better words to describe the man than "moron", but I tend towards the view that, "if the cap fits â¦". Once again, the man is
becoming the story. We need to do better than have somebody rehash tired falsehoods, racist slurs and "potentially misleading" statistics.
Thus, from here, the cap looks a very snug fit.
