Yes or No?

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Hello and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It's Helen Lewis.

And it is Armandi Nucci.

And this week, are we experiencing the death of nuance in political language?

It's a simple yes or no question.

Armando, before we start, I'm very excited by this.

You've dangled in front of me the prospect that you might have something to hang on the Kiostama metaphor tree.

Oh, yes.

It's going back to last week after the local elections.

Kirstama wrote a column in the Times explaining...

you know, that he was listening and he was going to get the message and how that was going to affect policy.

But anyway, he wrote this.

See if this is a kind of mixed metaphor or if it's just too detailed, the one metaphor.

He said, I get it.

I will wake up every morning determined to go further and faster.

I'm not going to navel gaze or turn inward.

Now, that just left me with the image of Kiostama in bed, looking at his stomach.

Being sort of sucked in, like a sort of black hole.

Yes.

He's sort of drawing him in.

This is like a portal to some other dimension.

Turning inward so much, he becomes a super dense prime minister.

Well, there we go.

We found the £22 billion black hole.

It's Kirstama's navel, cunningly disguised.

So much navel gazing is going on in White Hole.

That's the fault.

All right.

Well, I'm

glad we've cleaned that one up then.

We've found the answer.

I've had a happier time, which is that I've been reading Chumamand and Gozi and Diche's novel, Dream Counts.

It's her first novel in a decade.

It's all about the lives of women, particularly in midlife, but it's got a really beautiful author's note at the end in which she talks about the kind of purpose of art.

And just to see if you, I just really love this sentence.

The point of art is to look at our world and be moved by it and then to engage in a series of attempts at clearly seeing that world, interpreting it, questioning it.

And I just love that as a metaphor for any kind of, you know, artistic or journalistic project is, you know, I think...

Didn't George Orwell say that, you know, the seeing what's in front of one's nose is the hardest possible thing.

But it is that sense of actually just stripping away everything you've been told, everything that you kind of think that you ought to think, and actually just looking at things as they are.

I don't know if it still exists.

There was that school of poetry called Martian poetry.

Craig Rain, the early works of Craig Raine was described as Martian poetry.

And the idea behind the term was to describe the world as if a Martian was seeing it, as in someone seeing it for the first time, so therefore not arriving at it with a whole set of preconceptions as to what it might be or the value placed on it.

So describing it afresh as if new, which I think is, yes, I think that's a very good approach to how you write about the world, really.

And it's so easy to fall into the trap of just assuming people know.

I mean this is something we've been discussing on a weekly basis.

Politicians use terms, technical terms, that they just assume everyone understands when they don't.

Yes, Philip Larkin has something similar.

I think it's in the introduction to Jill, his only novel, where he says something like, write the books only you can write.

Yes.

So don't use a huge amount of allusion to other things.

Just again, just be like very straightforward about your experience.

But you're right, that is the opposite of political language, which happens often in this further and faster realm of sort of of weird kind of memes that just kind of spread like a virus through.

Yes, we talked a little bit in our conversation with Phil Wang last week about how politicians forget that you can tell when a politician speaks using the words that they would normally use.

And that's the, and Phil was talking about how Nigel Freige is very good at that.

I mean, whether they are the words he normally uses or not, I don't know.

I've never met him.

But the impression he conveys is of someone not overthinking what he says to play safe in an interview because he wants to appease all sides.

Whereas other politicians have fallen into that trap of blandifying everything they say so that it doesn't offend anyone.

Yeah, I think that's very complicated in the case of Nigel Farage, isn't it?

Because he has definitely got a kind of shtick, an incredibly successful one.

So he probably does use a lot of quite recycled phrases, but they're not.

the same recycled phrases as the ones you find in kind of the machine politicians exactly you know i don't think he's turbocharged anything i may have got that wrong if If anyone has heard him use the phrase turbocharged, then let me know.

You know, he makes his language conversational.

I mean, I've picked up and you've picked up on, you know, little tricks that he does do, which is, I'm only asking the question.

I don't know what the view is here.

Some people may think this.

I'm just raising it as an issue.

A lot of people have raised it with me, that sense of weighing in on sensitive topics without appearing to be too dog whistleblowery yourself.

Yeah, no, he knows where the line is.

Well, I think that probably takes us quite neatly to the subject of this week's episode.

So we're going to talk a bit about the kind of demand for...

You said the word shibboleth, which I have to say, I haven't heard for a while.

I haven't heard, in fact, since the West Wing episode that is titled Shibboleth.

And I don't even know how because Shibboleth, to anyone who doesn't know, and that included me until recently, it's a word.

The way you use it determines whether you are part of or not part of a certain group.

So it's a way of identifying.

And it's all to do with the pronunciation itself of the word shibboleth.

So certain people overstressed the sh, others said, and whether the the, you know, it was a way of marking people's identity.

And so, it's now used metaphorically to kind of imply language that you use that kind of identifies what your politics are.

And I raised that word because I found there are certain words current at the moment that do cause not just anguish as to whether people should use them.

I'm talking about, you know, what is a woman?

Genocide.

Something is happening where these words have become so powerful that,

in my opinion, they've kind of dampened the debate.

They've put people off because people are worried whether they will use the words the right way or not and what the consequences will be if they're perceived to use them incorrectly.

That's a very complicated way of saying we're just going to look at hot topics, as Alan Parges would say, but not really.

not really to analyse the arguments behind them, but to look at how these debates are being conducted.

Right.

And the most obvious one that springs to mind is the one you referenced there, which is the gender debate.

So I've been writing about that since the sort of mid-2010s.

And Stonewall, the big LGBT charity, ran a campaign during that time that said, trans women are women, get over it.

And it was this quite sort of straightforward thing.

And that was the thing that you had to say to prove that you were on the right team, basically.

And then you came across people like me who said, well, look, I'm very happy to treat people as they wish to be treated in society, use their names and pronouns, but I don't think that's necessarily the same as being biologically female.

You know, at that point, you've lost the room, right?

It was basically like, this is the proposition, yes or no.

And then it became, you know, the fact that a lot of people said no to that.

The Supreme Court judgment now backs up that interpretation in the equalities law.

But it was a kind of really bold way of just like, let's boil this argument down to its most essential elements.

And it became a shibboleth.

You either said it and then you were in one team, or you didn't say it, and you were assigned to the other team.

And there was no real middle ground between those two opinions.

And it became a gotcha question in interviews to ask ask of various politicians, you know, what is a woman?

And you mentioned yes or no.

I always

I do recommend people going on, it's probably still up an iPlayer, Lemmy, the Scottish comedian Lemmy, look up his yes or no sketch.

I'm sure he'd hate it being called the sketch.

It's a sort of a question time thing where he plays all the parts.

He plays the interviewer and the person in the audience.

And the person in the audience asks the politician, when is it right to kill someone?

I think that's what the question is, is it okay?

Yeah, is it okay to kill someone?

Yes or no?

Yes or no?

And the politician then tries to go, well, it's a very difficult question, obviously.

And thank you very much for the question.

If we could, and the question just keeps coming back, yes or no, yes or no.

Well, I know, I understand that.

I understand, you know, but as I say, it is complicated.

Yes or no.

And it reaches a level of absurdity where the person in the audience

won't concede there's any other way of looking at it from a yes.

I know I won't blow the the punchline because I think it's worth your while.

It's worth your while looking at it.

Those of you who have an adult disposition who are okay with strong language can go and check out the punchline.

What I liked about that sketch was that actually you very rarely see a sketch from a comedian, particularly someone who's kind of punkish and outsider like Limmy, that where actually your sympathy is essentially with the politician.

The question time member is essentially going, look, you know, like playing to the gallery of going, look, he won't even answer.

He can't even say a simple yes or no question.

And the poor guy's going, well, you know, self-defense is obviously very different from attacking someone.

What was yes or no?

And it was just, I thought it was a real encapsulation of the way that bad political interviews can go with a kind of just say the say the word, say the word.

And then an assumption if you don't just say the word, that you're somehow being weasly rather than reflecting the fact that life itself is often somewhat more complicated than yes or no.

But if we kind of step back, you would assume because the Supreme Court came up with a ruling on transgender and same-sex spaces, that in effect they'd supplied a kind of yes or no conclusion to the issue.

And we talked about how politicians seized on it and saying it's going to a welcome moment of clarity.

Now can we move on?

But in fact, things have become less clear in certain respects because of it.

I mean, the Supreme Court, for example, in their conclusion, and the summary said that the Equalities Act still provides transgender people with protections against discrimination.

And it wasn't the judge's place to weigh in on those definitions.

And that was up to other aspects of public debate.

You know, trans women who've been trans for 30 years and have been going to, you know, female toilets and all that time without any incident, have been saying, what do I do now?

Do I just stop?

And, you know, the fine print of the Supreme Court ruling was suggesting that, you know, things would have to be worked out.

But we lose sight of that in the headlines.

And yet,

the amount of acrimony between the trans community and the,

I'm even aware when I say community, I don't actually mean everyone in that community.

I mean vocal figures within it who may not be representative of it, or they may be, I don't know.

But certainly the discussion has still reached a kind of volume level.

You know, the number of incidents, physical or aggressive violence against trans people, but threats against, you know, the TERF contingent.

Inability to engage in debate, but to kind of reinforce very very strong aggressive opinions about your opponents that hasn't gone away yeah I mean I think it's always difficult isn't it to talk about um communities in that sense because you're right there is a sense that actually there are kind of activists who may or may not be representative of the kind of broad swathe of opinion and that doesn't just apply to gender that applies to you know religious groups for example you know are the people at the top of a particular religious denomination representative of the you know median member of that congregation actually not always And yeah, and it is an interesting ruling because, as you say, everybody sort of said it really brings clarity.

Well, there are some other things.

So, for example, how do you sort out toilets was a very big deal part of this ruling.

And it might be that if you didn't provide single-sex toilets, you might be indirectly discriminating against women.

But then, if you don't provide any toilets that trans people can reasonably use, that might also be indirect discrimination against them on the protected characteristic of gender reassignment.

So, I think that my hunch about, and we mentioned this in a previous episode, about why all the politicians said it brought welcome clarity, is what they really meant was it brought a welcome chance for me not to have to talk about this again,

which I have never wanted to do and I continue not to want to do.

The reason I wanted to bring it up was

with what's happening in Gaza at the moment, there's irrespective of where you stand on what the Israeli military and government are doing or what the situation in Gaza and how Hamas are using what's going on, irrespective of all that, it's generally agreed there is a horrendous humanitarian disaster taking place there now.

But

there hasn't been that

communal rush to help.

But it's somehow, even though we're watching this play itself out horrifically on our screens and reading about it, our default at the moment seems to be to remain inactive.

about it.

And it's that, again, because

this whole issue has become a for a lot of people a worrying or a dangerous issue to get engaged with because it it will all in the end depend on the words you use and how you use them that if you say genocide you're anti-semitic but if you don't say genocide you're islamophobic it's it's it's that

uh you know yes or no that that this or that binary choice that you know pick a side that a lot of people begin and i sort of fear that a lot of people are just feeling beaten down by it and would rather not get involved, even though they feel they should.

Or am I wrong?

Well,

I was going to say, I'm not sure that the Israeli government would actually accept the level of a humanitarian crisis.

I think from their point of view, they say it's a necessary military operation in order to hunt out Hamas and then in Lebanon and Hezbollah.

But you're right.

I think the reason that people are reluctant to comment on it is exactly because of the fact it's not like a famine that's caused by a terrible drought.

If it is a crisis, it's a man-made crisis.

And that may be justified in the pursuit of some larger aim, but it is definitely there is an implied criticism of the Israeli government and the Israeli military if you acknowledge there is any kind of problem with hunger or sanitation in Gaza because the Israeli government is responsible for food supplies and electricity supplies in Gaza.

And I think that's why it's become such a tense issue.

And you're right.

I went and looked at the history of whether or not

calling what's happening a genocide is incredibly contentious.

Oh, yes.

No, absolutely.

I mean, the Armenian, I mean, there's still a dispute, Turkey would dispute whether, you know, the over 100-year-old

Armenian genocide should be called genocide.

Yes, and I think that's because it's seen as being an incredibly powerful word.

So the dispute really goes back to South Africa's case

to the International Criminal Court, that they wanted a kind of international law ruling on this.

And then you see kind of people like the Labour MP, Andy MacDonald, who was at one point suspended from Labour for using this phrase from the river to the sea, which under the Labour guidelines is anti-Semitic because it implies the destruction of the state of Israel.

But he said, you know, he said in the Commons, the sight of a patient on an ivy drip burning to death in the flames of an airstrike on the tents of refugees will be the abiding image of this genocide.

And that kicked off a wave then where the Conservative MP, Nick Timothy, who used to be one of the senior A's to Theresa May, said to David Lamy, the foreign secretary, please denounce people who were using language like this.

So there was a kind of, you must say genocide, then there was a kind of anyone who says genocide needs to be rebuked from it.

And it just becomes this kind of ping-pong back and forth about this one particular word.

Yes, yes.

And also, you know, other words that were then used in a much more overtly political way for point scoring in a way, the marches, pro-Palestinian marches or marches, you know, for the plight of the Gaza.

Suella Braverman called them hate marches.

And she's seizing upon the fact that some of those who supported the march were also very outspoken about, as you say,

the end of Israel.

Yeah, I mean, I went and covered one of those.

I covered the Remembrance Day march, which was both a site for people from the English Defence League and other kind of organizations, had kicked off a massive ruck by the cenotaph, which didn't seem very respectful to Britain's war dead, to my mind.

But also, I then went and covered the pro-Palestine march.

And yeah, I did see signs that I would categorize as anti-Semitic, you know, equating Netanyahu with Hitler, for example.

But I also saw a huge number of people who were not, those were not their political aims.

They were worried about what they saw as a humanitarian crisis and so that becomes the argument you know how what percentage of a minority in a crowd should be taken to define that crowd yes you know does it take one anti-semitic person in that crowd to make it an anti-semitic march well and that's again that kind of comes back to a to a shibboleth doesn't it really like it comes back to one one word being

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Use one person.

That is my fear.

That the way politics is conducted now is that you just have to find one

example of the charge that you are claiming in the other side for then everyone on the other side to be accused of that charge.

But that's happening more and more.

And I don't know whether is this something in our discourse?

I often think people form their opinions about things by listening to other people's opinions, people they respect, whether they agree with them or not, but listening to them, and also maybe consciously or subconsciously absorbing also the facts about the situation.

And, you know, if you're serious about these things, you know, at some point you'll use all that to come up with what you feel about it.

There has been a flow away from facts and towards opinion much more and more.

It's harder to get at the facts.

You know, fact-checking has gone down.

Opinion forming has gone up.

I mean, are there just too many opinions out there?

Are what we're doing?

Yeah, we're only making it worse, aren't we?

We're not a news programme.

We're applying our background knowledge and skill sets, I suppose, to pick our way through certain issues, hopefully in an informative and entertaining way.

But I also think it's about setting up a referendum, isn't it?

And I think that you either

use that word.

I know, sorry.

But also, it's about taking a word or a person.

A person, is X person good or bad?

Which is not really a way that, you know, I think about it, about some of the debates we have about Winston Churchill.

You know, is Winston Churchill the hero of the Second World War who stood up to Hitler, or is he the guy who was complicit in the Bengal famine?

And the truth is that he's both.

So you can't never say Winston Winston Churchill yay or nay.

But so I think you get these referendum on these either a word or a person that are a way of just kind of boiling the whole argument down just to one thing.

And I saw, you know, the Free Press, which is a very pro-Israeli online outlet in the US, had a piece which I think the headline of it will age badly.

It's called the Gaza Famine Myth.

But their argument essentially rests on the idea that famine has a technical definition about 20% of households having run out of food, 30% of children are actively malnourished, you know, that kind of level, which they say that the situation in Gaza does not meet at the moment.

They're not denying there's hunger there, they're just saying doesn't meet this definition of famine.

And they spoke to the guy who came up with this definition, Nicholas Hahn, who he said, My goal was to take famine from being a rhetorical word and make it a technical term.

You know, I think that's a very laudable ambition.

But of course, then as soon as you make it a case of facts, people start arguing about the facts instead because what they really want to have is an argument about something much bigger.

Yes, and I suppose the strategy behind that headline, the famine myth, is in small print, it's about defining, does this meet the official definition of famine?

But the takeaway is, and therefore, let's not give what's happening the level of priority or urgency that certain communities are asking for.

It's trying to downplay what's happening.

I mean, my way approach these things is, okay, I won't use that word.

I'll just say it's horrible, you know, and it's getting worse.

And why aren't we doing anything about it?

You know, it's things like that.

But I think you can sit on the other side, too, which is that it is also true to say that the founding charter of Hamas is explicitly genocidal.

Yeah, absolutely.

That it would be very happy for every Jewish person in the world to no longer exist.

I mean, they've since updated the charter with a rather more allegedly pragmatic one, but that is certainly the roots of that organization.

And it calls for a Palestinian state that goes, that covers all the territory that is currently covered by Israel.

So you've got a situation in which you just seem like the most sort of lily-livered milquetoast centrist to go, I think that

Hamas are bad and a terrorist organisation.

I also think that some of the actions of the Israeli government have been bad.

And then people at that point will jump in and say, how are you possibly drawing equivalence between the two of them?

And you say, well, I'm not doing that.

I'm just saying that I want to reserve the right to criticise both sides of this conflict.

How do we make that considered opinion much more potent?

And how does that get heard?

The trouble is, I don't think it's possible because one of the reasons that we're having such an argument about the technical definition of famine or the technical definition of genocide is that there are consequences that flow from applying those labels.

So what the people who want to call that situation a genocide want us to do is sever our trade links with Israel and also maybe lobby the US, which is a huge supplier of military aid to Israel, to

be much tougher with it.

So I think that's the problem is that you can have a sort of squishy middle position, but there are, at the end of it, policy choices that have to be made.

And that's what flows from the wording.

And that's when I think that's when the referendums kind of end up happening.

And I wonder also whether there's been more and more legislation around the definition of words, whether it's how do we define hate speech, how do we define misogyny?

And I do wonder, I think I've said this before on this programme, that, you know, when you have to legislate a belief, you're kind of admitting you haven't been able to carry out the argument.

You haven't persuaded people.

So you now have to just make it the law.

Yeah, no, I think hate speech legislation is really troublesome.

And And I mean, I think probably I've changed my mind on that.

You know, I would have said 10 years ago that the incredible flowering of terrible trolling

on the internet meant that we needed some legislation to deal with hate speech.

Now, having seen it applied, in practice, the way that hate speech works is quite differential.

So, for example, you're more likely to be convicted of hate speech if the speech was directed at a police officer, which suggests to me that it gets added on to something, some encounter that people already had with the police.

It's also when you look at the survey statistic, it's self-reported.

So, that also adds a level of fuzziness because what to me, you know, you should see the things that people say to me on the internet every day, I'm under, well, I'm sure you've had a few of them yourself.

I mean, I'm writing them.

So

that's you, is it?

Okay, I know.

That's where this ends.

Right, okay.

You're probably out yourself.

Well, but you know what I mean.

Like, I just, I mean, I'm sure several of them have reached the level of actionable, but it would be beyond my interest in life to pursue all of them.

And so you end up with these situations where sometimes you've got what are clearly vexatious complaints of two people who are having a reciprocal ding-dong and they both start accusing the other of hate speech.

And, you know, and you think it's a bit like someone's kind of, you know, Leylandii dispute, you know, where somebody's hedge is overgrown.

What we're essentially doing is ask the courts to sort out the fact that these people don't like each other and both want somebody to say that they're in the right.

I think sometimes we just lose sight of the fact that life involves inevitably a level of fuzziness and the law can't solve all your problems.

Exactly.

And also, you know, the more engaged we are with, you know, social media, the more we are, subconsciously or not, opinion makers.

We're expected to weigh in on topics, aren't we?

I'm not just talking about, you know, people like us who are on Radio 4, but anyone, anyone with an account to get followers, to feel that they're engaged in the debate, feel obliged to express an opinion.

So I really dislike that tendency.

It happened a lot.

In the run-up to Easter, Keirstan was getting a lot of attacks from the right on X, formerly Twitter, alleging that he did a tweet welcoming Diwali, he did a tweet welcoming Eid, but that he wasn't paying sufficient attention to Christian festivals.

And, you know, in the end, he did do an Easter message and this kind of stuff.

But I just, I like the kind of that reductive element that, do you know what it always reminds me of?

This is a very outdated reference.

So the first Bridget Jones film, there's a, there's a scene where she attends a literary party and she starts naming authors in the room who thinks are good.

And Salman Rushdie's there and she says, Salma Rushie, it's great to have you here.

And then she looks around and she sees Geoffrey Archer and she goes, Geoffrey Archer, your books are good as well.

And there is this sort of feeling that if you mention one injustice, you have to sort of mention them all.

Or if you mention, you know, one thing, you have to pay exactly the right amount of attention to another one and it just becomes like the treating of life as this sort of giant scorecard that's right yes yes and and when we were talking about you know the legislation that defines certain words and terms you know part of what we've been discussing on a weekly basis is that language is changing all the time so something that might have been defined in legislation 10 years ago 15 years ago i mean that word may have moved on in its meaning you know it and do you update the legislation on a constant basis or do you we're trying to freeze meanings, aren't we?

And therefore measure how close you come to that frozen meaning as to whether you're within the law or transgressing the law.

Yeah, and it also becomes a kind of ranking system as well, of trying to like you see it with kind of historical atrocities, an attempt to kind of produce a final definitive ranking of which one was worse.

And you think, well, that's for the people that it happened to, it was, you know, it was, it was the worst thing that ever happened to them.

But I'm, you can't, apart from that, just sort of put a numerical value alongside things in that way.

In a lighter note,

I'm not sure we've sorted that one out.

Have you seen a politician sidestep it?

Is my question to you?

Is there any has anyone ever defeated the yes or no question?

I can't think of an example where they have.

No, I must go through.

I think I've cited him before, Kenneth Clark and his jazz approach to interviews where he just went,

I'm sure he's managed to get around it at some point on Roger.

Well, Trump probably agreed with the interviewer and then disagreed with the interviewer and subsequent clauses.

Should you uphold the Constitution, Mr.

Brown?

I don't know.

Maybe I should.

Maybe I shouldn't.

Lawyers say I should, but I don't know if I should.

Yeah, we'll see what happens.

No, I just wanted to go back to the flags, the flags that I mentioned last week.

So once reform won various mayoralities and councils, they put out a message saying they were only going to put up union jack flags and St.

George Cross flags.

There was a row.

Does that mean you're not going to support Ukraine?

Does that mean you're not going to put the county flags up and so on?

But just how instantly on all sides it went up to 11.

I mentioned Labour MP Mike Tapp, who called this whole thing sickening.

You know, if you're not going to acknowledge, you know, other things like Ukraine.

He carried on, as VE Day reminds us, Britain has a proud history of working with allies to defeat dictators and tyrants.

It tells you all you need to know about Nigel Farage's reform, that their very first act after winning election is to ban the Ukrainian flag from our town halls.

In this of all weeks, they should stop sucking up to pewter.

So, you know, instantly, these people are vile, treacherous,

whatever.

And then, so a reform spokesperson then put out the statement when they said, no, we are allowed to put up county flags.

Reform UK will proudly fly the Union Jack, St.

George's flag, and county flags.

Unlike the Tories and Labour, we are proud of our country and history.

So, already, you know, just county

flags within hours becomes a a topic of like whether you're a patriot or not.

In a way, I sort of think this is a bit like giving a child a toy to keep them occupied, like giving them the Game Boy.

I sort of think ultimately, I'm sorry, I don't even know where my local town hall is after having lived here for many years.

Frankly, they could be flying anything above it, and I wouldn't really, they could be flying a pair of bloomers above it, and I wouldn't really know.

Well, what does that say about you, Helen?

What other things do you want flying on it that you haven't said?

Yeah, it's true.

Do you want a grenade?

Do you want a grenade up there?

You haven't said you want.

Is that what you want?

Is that what you want?

But you know what I mean?

I think it's keeping them all busy and out of trouble.

And that's probably for the best.

Oh, yes.

I have a word to bring you.

Oh, good.

Yes.

It's actually a return of a great word that I previously enjoyed on this programme.

CBS News in America explained the conclave to elect the new Pope, and they said that cardinals were banned from having electronic devices with them while the voting was going on.

And someone shipped in to say, one thing we know is they're not checking Instagram because their devices have all been confiscated.

And a fellow anchor replied, I believe the kids call it raw dogging.

So there we are, they are raw dogging the conclave, which was not a phrase that any of us could have predicted would appear on the news some years ago.

But I thought this was a really interesting example.

So raw dogging for more sensitive listeners is unprotected sex, but it has now been

through a process that they call semantic bleaching,

which is that it now just means doing anything without kind of digital distraction.

Okay, okay.

Do you we now call the cardinals raw dogmatics?

Yay, thank you.

Raw Dogma.

Yeah, the update to the film.

Other

Christian churches are available.

It's a great name for your band, by the way.

Should you wish to form a kind of midlife scar band?

Raw Dogmatics.

Raw Dogmatics.

Yeah, it would be great.

Hello, Birmingham.

We've also got an email from a listener.

Do you remember I talked about my new improved for my convenience headphones that were actually worse than their predecessors?

And someone wrote in saying we call that improving things worse.

Uh, well, we now have uh a letter from

everyone.

Oh, lots.

Yeah, yeah, we've had an absolute torrent of emails from uh many, including Darren Stevens, Natalie Groom, Bernard Brownsword, Robin McWilliams, Rob from Watford, and Peter Witte about this.

You've got Peter's email, I think.

I have, and it says, I thought the podcast might be interesting to know that in German there is a specific word for this phenomenon, namely Verschlimbesserung, a term formed of Verbesserung, meaning improvement, and schlim, meaning bad.

So, splicing the two together gives Verschlim Besserung.

And Peter, if you've made me say a very rude word in German, I will find you.

I will hunt you down and I will find you.

What is notabout about this term is that it's widely recognized and used across the population.

Although, whether this is because the German language naturally lends itself to this kind of portmanteau, or because the Germans are grumpy and complain so much about everything, seems unlikely.

A delightful people, every time I've been, they inevitably have the language with which to do so, I cannot say.

So, there we go.

Verschlim Besserung.

I'm going to use that every time I switch my headphones on.

Thanks for listening to Strong Message Here.

We'll be back next week.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

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