WOW! INCREDIBLE!! TOXIC!!!

‘And there in the wood

A piggywig stood,

With a ring at the end of his nose, his nose

With a ring at the end of his nose…’

But now on the sands

A misogynist stands,

With murder and hate in his eyes, his eyes,

With murder and hate in his eyes…’

Let me put this updated nonsense rhyme in context…

I am lying on a yoga mat in my living room which serves as a menagerie when my personal trainer is here. I am variously a cat, a cow, a dog, a swan, a bug in the last throes of death. ‘So what happened,’ my personal trainer asks me abruptly, ‘to the male chauvinist pig?’

I don’t have a personal trainer exactly. What I have is someone who plucks and pulls and stretches me. A personal elasticator. David he’s called. Without him I’d be short and tight and knotted. So, when he asks where the male chauvinist pig has gone I am minded to take the question personally.

Once, I was as round and sluggish as a Gloucestershire Old Spot; now, thanks to all the indignities he’s subjected me to, I am as sleek and sinuous as a Siberian tiger. I roll over on the mat and catch sight of my reflection in a mirror. I bare my teeth. Credit where credit’ s due. I wouldn’t want to come across myself on a dark night. But what relevance does that ‘male chauvinist’ reference have? Is David saying I am not just a new man physically but a new man emotionally too? Can exercise do that?

It turns out that David – who is something of a philosopher – isn’t talking about my appearance or my character at all. He’s talking linguistics. Why, he wonders, has the phrase ‘male chauvinist pig’ fallen out of use in favour of the far more damning description of men – all men, according to some women - as misogynists. Has the phrase ‘male chauvinist pig’ gone into the dustbin of sexual history because men are no longer merely rotters with waxed moustaches but fully-fledged brutes? Or is it that women are no longer prepared to make allowances for their caddishness.

‘Both,’ my wife who is being a lobster on the mat next to mine, says.

In fact, David’s point isn’t that sexual politics have changed but that the way we use words has. We’ve always had misogynists. What strikes him as new is that we only have misogynists now. We don’t get there by degrees. No other word is even under consideration. Whatever men are or aren’t, language itself has turned extreme. But why? Why the need to blow one another out of the water every time we speak?

I find these questions so engrossing that I beg to be excused Kafka’s cockroach so I can go to my desk and write down other examples of inordinate linguistic usage. The first word that comes to mind is ‘incredible’, which I would call the most overworked and bloated adjective in the English Language were that not itself an overworked and bloated thing to say. Remember the days when we got on fine with ‘very’? How’s work going? Very well, thank you. Not anymore, it isn’t. Quite simply, ‘very’ is not ‘very’ enough for the times we live in. The word’s defunct. Gone to meet its maker. Pushing up daisies. Today - no matter if we’re describing nothing more earth-shattering than a politician’s timetable - we must beggar credulity. Is the MP working hard for her constituents? Hard? She is working incredibly hard for her constituents. Do we actually believe that? Let’s say we are incredibly doubtful.

I love hyperbole myself. If I could have been any writer other than myself or Shakespeare I’d have chosen Dickens. I love the imaginative richness of Dickensian exaggeration - the exuberance, the amplitude, the absurdist generosity. You come away from a Dickens novel loving life more than you did when you started it. Once hyperbole forgets to be funny, however, it works against its own best interests. Start on the top register and there’s no graceful way of coming down or, indeed, of getting back up again. When every ‘very’ is an incredibly, ‘very’ itself shrinks to meaning not very much. Answer ‘How Are You’ with a mere ‘Very Well, Thank You’ and your interlocutor will assume you have a week to live.

David is right. To us moderns, the world loses its savour if events are not supersized and words don’t go off like weather-bombs, which is what we now call a gust of wind.

Take the example of Elon Musk, who bought himself a social media site so he could inflame opinion at will, changing its name from Twitter, which wasn’t loud enough, to X, in order, presumably, to suggest raucous, under-the-counter misbehaviour. According to Musk, the Labour politician Jess Phillips is ‘a rape genocide apologist’ for not instituting a national inquiry into the grooming of underage girls. Not only don’t the words, ‘a rape genocide apologist’ make any sense or belong together - except by fall-out of from some nonsense-speak explosion - they are bizarrely inappropriate to the work Jess Phillips has been doing as Under-Secretary for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Children. I admire Jess Phillips immeasurably. I find her incredible. Whether she has done enough to Safeguard Girls and Women against violence I am in no position to know, but even not doing enough doesn’t make you an apologist for rape genocide.

Well, you don’t buy Twitter if it’s truth or justice you care about. And you don’t change its name to X unless you want it to be a place where verbal chaos reigns and words prance about without their clothes, shouting obscenities.

Of the four-word accusation – ‘a rape genocide apologist’ – only ‘a’ isn’t fulminatory. ‘Apologist’, of course, is the new big hot word for advocate of anything we happen not to find acceptable. If you are hoping to bag a seat on Elon Musk’s rocket to Mars, you won’t be describing his admirers as apologists; if you’re not, you might. Call someone an apologist for genocide and you get two big hot new words for the price of one. Before we relaxed the rules of etymology, people particular about language reserved the word ‘genocide’ to mean the deliberate annihilation of an entire people. Now, we are in too much of a hurry to wait for the evidence of that. As with genocide so with massacre, ethnic-cleansing, apartheid and the like – we like using the language of intemperate outrage too much to forgo it just because it might be incredibly inaccurate.

Once, we prided ourselves on the rich appositeness of our vocabulary. Ours was a language that could be relied on to yield the right word to describe any event. Those days are gone. Now we start with words culled from our thesaurus of extravagant allegation and mould events to their shape.

Did I just read that the Irish government is itching to stretch genocide’s parameters so that it can use the term whenever the fancy takes it, regardless of its justice? Gilbert and Sullivan would be greatly amused. In place of the Mikado’s sublime ambition to let the punishment fit the crime, the Irish propose making the crime fit the word.

My elasticator doesn’t look comfortable talking about genocide. Genocide is a word on fire and shouting back at it won’t put out the flames. Misogyny the same. Not every man who does wrong by women hates them, but it’s hard to argue that without sounding like a misogynist. And it’s hard to argue with genocide without appearing to be an ‘apologist’ for it.

Both are toxic words, we agree. Toxic itself being balloon-speak for poisonous. There used to be unhappy marriages. Now they’re toxic. And that doesn’t just mean the couple are unhappy. It means you daren’t risk being in the same room with them without a mask.

And then there’s sport, David says. Have I noticed that people don’t simply lose any more? They are smashed, blitzed, devastated. Even darts has become a bloodbath. Luke Littler’s opponents aren’t just comprehensively trounced by him; they leave the oche with the number 180 ringing in their ears, chastened, degraded and humiliated.

I don’t need to be told about humiliated. David is getting me to do the cat and the cow, which entails pretending I have a tail and wagging it. I ask if I can do the piggy-wig in the wood with a ring in its nose instead. David shakes his head. There is no going back.

First delivered on BBC Radio 4’s A Point of View on Jan 24 2025