They are, in other words, prevaricators, from the Latin varus, meaning bandy-legged and/or knock-kneed.

The lip-bending term is a useful adjunct to the more modern political term of ‘flip-flopper’: one who can never quite make up their mind. Susie Dent on Countdown. © 2020 Associated Newspapers Limited. And, for all that we rely on the voices of our representatives to echo our own, English-speakers have long framed such talk as nonsense. Of course what we all want is the ‘naked truth’, warts and all. If you consider the man only in terms of the square of the hypotenuse, think again – interpretations of his views on cosmology, philosophy, justice, and even vegetarianism inspired multiple sects, and in-fighting was commonplace. var sc_security="37fb5248"; If you enjoyed this blog, please subscribe free by email. If the entire process looks likely to self-combust we might happily see a Brexplosion – appropriately enough, given that the first meaning of ‘explode’ was to hiss and boo a mediocre actor off the stage. Notify me of followup comments via e-mail. Unfortunately it’s one that would give any politician severe indigestion. Whatever a politician’s level of probity, talking – a lot – remains a key job requirement. After being defeated in the California State Primary in 1962, Dick Tuck accepted with six words of pain: ‘The people have spoke. Please enable Javascript in your browser before continuing.

At the time she began work on Countdown in 1992, she had just started working for the Oxford University Press on producing English dictionaries, having previously worked on bilingual dictionaries. Whatever you call them, if you are taken in by such stories, you are quite possibly a ‘gobemouche’, a term borrowed from French where it means ‘fly-swallower’, conjuring up the image of someone listening with their mouth open so wide any insect can happily take up residence.

It is from such division that the word ‘ipsedixitism’ was born. Debates over the truth or otherwise of the teachings of Pythagoras caused brouhahas for centuries after his death. Many gathered around him, begging him to finally sit down, but still he soldiered on, declaring that he was doing this ‘for Buncombe’. There, phoney doctors (known under a Dutch name, ‘quacksalvers’ – ‘ointment-rubbers’ – or ‘quacks’ for short) would come to perform and plug their medicinal wares. But when it comes to prevarication, I prefer the straight-speaking English dialect ‘whiffling’ – blowing this way and that on the ‘whiffs’ or puffs of the wind. These are the toadies or ‘toad-eaters’, an expression that began in the markets and fairgrounds of 16th-century England. var scJsHost = (("https:" == document.location.protocol) ? Tweets by @RichardJMurphy

We are as a species a gossipy, mithering lot, so it’s perhaps no surprise that our politicians are easy targets for tongue-whipping. For security reasons, credit card donations require Javascript. A mugwump, in American politics, is one who sits with their legs firmly astride the fence. Our Website uses cookies to improve your experience.

In this business, as Winston Churchill noted, you can be killed many times, and not just by one’s fellow workers. That is not good news for democracy. If we began with Reagan, it’s only fair to end with the words of a Democratic politician. The TV star's publisher, John Murray Press, was forced … Brexchosis – the feeling of despair among Remoaners, Brexthrough – the long-anticipated but ever-elusive Brexit breakthrough, Brexplosion – if/when the whole process self-combusts. ‘Ambition’ itself is from ‘ambire’, to walk around – first applied to those same Roman candidates who went about canvassing votes. This is the mushroom principle of Government. Such one-sided treatment isn’t unique to politicians, of course, and lexicographers, like the language they chase, are simply there to describe, not prescribe. Allegra Strachan is a political appointment, reporting directly to No.10. Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. Few are the tribes whose reputation sits as low as that of politicians (bankers may be the one exception). Speaking of preposterousness – a word based on the Latin for the last (‘post’) coming first (‘pre’), and applied to anything so absurd that the truth seems positively reversed – those in the 19th century showed quite remarkable prescience with the phrase ‘Come, come, that’s Barnard Castle!’, used as a response to someone who had offered a flimsy excuse for reprehensible actions. At the blunter end is ‘cock and bull’, an expression to which two inns in Stony Stratford jealously lay claim.
From shambles to disaster, the vocabulary of failure has had an unhappy airing this results season.
as is his inability to grasp detail.

Sticking with wind, one who loves the sound of their own voice and holds forth for hours with empty rhetoric, and quite possibly untruths, is a bloviator, a blower of hot air.

They will not have to follow the rules for party political broadcasts. It can’t be much fun – the ex-MP Gyles Brandreth once mused: ‘Happiness is the constituency in the rear-view mirror’. Susie Dent: From fart-catchers to a possible Brexthrough, political language continues to evolve “‘Status quo: you know, that is Latin for ‘the mess we’re in’”.

‘Ipsedixitism’ came to prove highly useful, unsurprisingly, in court, where it was applied to an assertion that rested exclusively on the authority of a single speaker. She is not elected so does not have to answer to Parliament. "https://secure." Another fruitful category in Oxford’s historical thesaurus is devoted to lackeys – the fawning flatterers who follow the prevailing wind. In the world of ‘epic’ hyperbolic language, nothing will ever be truly awesome again, How English swear words went away from the holy and back to the shit again, Fear and loathing of foreigners is embedded in the language we use. This takes us back to antiquity, and the fable of Truth and Falsehood personified. There are many other names for these apparent deliverers of pish and twaddle. Susie Dent, long-reigning queen of Countdown’s Dictionary Corner and self-professed word geek, is talking about her precious collection of little black books.

On the other side, the many anti-Pythagoreans accused his devotees of dogmatically regurgitating his beliefs without any evidence to back them up. Buncombe became bunkum and a byword for political flummery that has endured ever since.

‘Toady’ soon took on the extended meaning of an obsequious parasite whose would please his master at any price. A riffle through the virtual pages of the Oxford English Dictionary delivers a feast when it comes to political epithets. The quack’s assistant would pretend to eat a poisonous toad, only to be miraculously ‘saved’ by the quack, who would then duly declare his potion to be a cure-all. All in all, we – and hence our dictionaries – are rarely kind to those who represent us. Strachan will be used strategically and tactically whilst at the same time providing a ‘cut out’ to prevent embarrassment for Bojo. ‘Warts and all’, by the way, is said to have been inspired by Oliver Cromwell, who insisted that his portrait painter imitate real life rather than gloss over any facial imperfections. Susie Dent (you know her: the one from 8 Out of Ten Cats does Countdown, and the day time version too, or so I’m told) is surprisingly subversive on Twitter. True to her nature, Truth prefers to go naked rather than be seen in anything belonging to Falsehood. The ancients knew a thing or two about ‘alternative facts’. The bastards’. Translated from the Greek by the Roman orator and philosopher Cicero, it means simply ‘he said it’, referring to the blind subservience of Pygathoras’s followers, for whom the only thing that mattered was that ‘it’ came from the master. Brexit has spawned a groaning lexicon all to itself, from Boris Johnson’s brexchosis (the feeling of despair among Remoaners) to the long-anticipated but ever-elusive Brexthrough. It could also be a useful collective noun, perhaps for a group of ‘snollygosters’. The quack was the puppetmaster during such dubious entertainment, and recent political events have surely resurrected the need for terms describing a wholly unequal balance of power.

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Nearly 30 years and more than 2,500 programmes later, she’s still there. !function(d,s,id){var js,fjs=d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0],p=/^http:/.test(d.location)? British thoughts are of course dominated by the word all of us, no matter what our allegiance, wished had never been invented. "It certainly wasn't the career path that I had deliberately chosen, and I'm naturally the sort of perso

Please visit our Data Protection & Cookie Policy page for more information about cookies and how we use them. The Oxford English Dictionary offers, for example, dozens of synonyms for the liar, ranging from the 14th century ‘leasing-monger’ to the Victorian ‘pseudologist’, with nods to the ‘falsificator’, ‘gabber’, and ‘wrinkler’ along the way.


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