Weird? As contemporary insults go, it feels fairly survivable. In fact, when compared with boomer, bigot, karen, gammon and hag – key concepts in much progressive civic discourse – weird is practically, in ascribing individuality to the targeted person, a compliment. Which when applied to a tech prodigy, weird usually is.

But vagueness about the exact offensiveness of weird is probably one reason this demi-slur is currently considered, by senior Democrats and a host of US commentators, to be the perfect, supremely effective response to the much cruder attacks on Kamala Harris now emanating from Donald Trump and his deputy. For years, Trump’s opponents considered restraint the dignified response to his ugliest invective. Today, when Trump/Vance go low, experimenting with the impact of, for instance, “she’s a bum”, “Crazy Kamala”, it is Democrat strategy smoothly to respond with, “just plain weird”, or variations like “old and quite weird”, “strange and old”. When Trump finally attempted an answer – “They’re the weird ones. Nobody’s ever called me weird” – rewarding clips of his difficulty were promptly and inevitably classified as “weird”.

One of the earliest outings for an attack line that was plainly impossible when the even older Joe Biden was acting strange came, shortly after his replacement with Harris, in response to Trump’s reference, for no remotely comprehensible reason, to Thomas Harris’s fictional serial killer. “Hannibal Lecter from ‘Silence of the Lamb’, [sic] is a lovely man.”

Trump’s been Lecter-obsessing for ages. But this time it prompted “Say it with me: weird” from the taunt’s original weaponiser, Minnesota governor, Tim........

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