A new television wildlife series called Queens (the ruling kind, not the screaming kind) shows competition among hyenas that involves infanticide. ‘I want it to feel that you see yourself, your family and your friends in these stories, that they’re relatable,’ the writer of the series told the Daily Mail. Well, Veronica has reached adulthood without my murdering her, though I recognise the temptation. Anyway, everything has to be relatable now, so much so that the word has almost been emptied of meaning.

Yet I find curiously alien things fascinating, such as conditions on other planets. And I have not entirely given up trying to understand what people mean by quantum physics. Such matters have no immediate connection with my life or experiences. If they are relatable, it is only through my finding them of interest: a me nihil alienum puto.

Relating, in the sense of having empathy for someone or identifying with a situation, has come into use only since the second world war. ‘Jung had considerable difficulty in relating to men, and had few male friends,’ wrote his biographer Anthony Stevens in 1990.

I admit there is such a thing as relatable humour, set in ordinary homes. The Royle Family was a brilliant example. But it would not have been so relatable for members of active, intellectual or higher-class families that don’t sit in front of the television in neutral gear all evening.

Allied to relatability is an odd method of interpreting utterances though ‘relevance theory’. It has been going for 30 or 40 years. In 1995 Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson published Relevance: Communication and Cognition. It boils down to the principle that every utterance conveys information relevant enough for it to be worth the addressee’s effort to process it. I’m afraid we shall hear more of this line of thinking. But a kind of snort has just come from my husband’s armchair, and my utterance in response was: ‘It looks like you’ve dropped off again.’ I doubt if he got as far as appreciating the relevance of my remark, relatable as it might have been.