IS our apparent obsession with terms and phrases beginning to cloud our judgement?

As we all try to find a way through what is still a very difficult time and with Brexit on the horizon, I am afraid things are only going to get worse. But it doesn’t have to be this way.

I am struggling to understand what ‘woke’ is. I was led to believe it basically means someone who is aware of social issues. That can’t be a bad thing can it? Call me woke and I am proud of being so. Forgive me if I am wrong but was not the term forged by African-American communities?

But then it happened. We reinvented the term so we could use it to criticise opinions we don’t agree with. ‘Wokeness’ or ‘woke culture’ is now very much a way to describe anyone who may seem to get offended easily or wants to raise issues we would rather nobody bothered with. It has been weaponised against anyone who does something to raise awareness of, in particular, race and culture.

A gammon is, as far as I can understand generally a person who is stuck in his or her ways and goes red with rage on petty issues. The gammon as we all know is the hind leg of pork, thus the redness and skin colour being an issue. What is glazed gammon then?

But I kind of take offence to that as I know a hell of lot of people who do exactly the same and don’t go red but do tend to be blow a top when they see something that irritates them. So, can someone who is not white also be described as a gammon? I would say yes, why not?

Then we have the whole thing of painting people ‘lefties’, in particular comedians for saying the stuff nobody else wants to say. I mean, if you lined all the lefties on one side of Britain and then all the people who call them lefties on the other side - what side of the country would you rather live in? Being a leftie liberal type became a crime and almost any group that protests can be classed as having been ‘infiltrated’ by these people.

Our latest enemies of the state are climate awareness group Extinction Rebellion. I must say, come on. Barring the odd person who goes a little over the top, have you seen them? How the hell did they become public enemy number one?