[Acrylic-bob]

What all this demonisation of offensive words, ideas, images, and objects fails to recognise is that substituting the inoffensive for the offensive only results in the inoffensive becoming the new offensive.

Surely, it cannot be long before children are complaining that Blue Pencils ruined their lives. You can see the process at work in the successive name changes that the former slave population in America have adopted as acceptable, to the extent that I am now at a loss to know what to call them.

The truth of the matter is that there are certain aspects of life that are, perhaps, unpalatably true; a dog is a dog, and no amount semantic acrobatics will make it into anything other than what it is and always has been.