“What’s happened to our country?” rages someone, somewhere, maybe at an oak table with a nice view. “You could call a person d-m--t-d, provided they weren’t. They could take a joke.

“Now you can’t say anything. Woke fascism! The Queen’s English is now all ‘trigger words’. These f-----g dashes and quote marks, I’m sick of them! You have to speak like your maiden aunt. What, that’s sexist, ageist and virginist? Your m----- a---? Not good enough? Your ------ ----?”

Illustration: Simon LetchCredit:

Context is the last refuge of the scoundrel, as Dr Johnson didn’t say, and in Anthony Albanese’s case the context was only a deeper bucket of sh-- that he’d stepped in on Tuesday when, as the opposition frontbench b--bled (Albanese’s word) while he was trying to explain something about taxation, he snapped: “This nonsense that they carry on with ... Have you got Tourette’s or something?”

Gotcha! Similarly, the ABC journalist Patricia Karvelas got jumped all over for using “schizophrenic”. Gotcha again! If there’s one thing the anti-woke relish, it’s when the woke slip up, given that the anti-woke think many of the woke are actually faux-woke.

Unravelling these controversies can be truly m--d b-nding, but let’s give it a try. We’ll eliminate any words that are too upsetting. P---- D----- and his treasury spokesman, whom we’ll call Andrew Peacock, were the ones who baited Albanese, the country’s chief woke officer, into his anti-woke outburst about T-------’s. But for them to chastise him would be anti-anti-woke, too close to coming full circle and sounding woke themselves. So, the L-----l Party shows that it has some use for women and deploys shadow health minister Anne Ruston to deliver the lecture: “M---ing a disability is no l----ing matter. Australians living with T-------’s........

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