I have finally snapped! I have become so annoyed by lying halfwits misusing the word ‘genocide’ that I am going to spell out the true meaning of the word and why they are making complete fools of themselves every time they apply ‘genocide’ to the deaths of civilians in Gaza. I will try to explain this in short, simple words so that even the slow boy at the back of the room will finally understand. ‘Genocide’ was coined by Polish-born US lawyer and linguist Raphael Lemkin in 1944 to label the attempt by the Nazis to completely wipe out the Jewish people in Europe. The Nazis called their mass slaughter of Jews ‘the Final Solution’; we call it the Holocaust. Six million Jewish men, women and children were slaughtered in those genocidal death camps. The ‘geno-’ part of the word ‘genocide’ comes from genus a Latin word meaning, in this context, ‘race’. It labels the race of people into which one is born. The suffix -cide comes from the Latin cīdium meaning killing, slaying, murder. The deaths of tens of thousands of civilians in a warzone in Gaza during the fiercest of the fighting is completely and totally unlike the cold-blooded decision by the Nazis to attempt to slaughter an entire race of people – a commitment they pursued during the prolonged years of the second world war. For a start, the Palestinians are not a race. They are group within the much larger Arabic race. Secondly, there are often (in fact, usually) severe civilian casualties in a warzone – think of the carpet-bombing of German cities by the RAF in world war two, the Tet Offensive in Vietnam or the atom bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tens of thousands of civilians died. But this was not ‘genocide’ – there was no attempt to slaughter an entire race of people, as happened with the Nazi pursuit of the Jews. So, when activists use the word ‘genocide’ to describe Gaza, they are either fools or liars. (Or both.)

Speccie reader Fay complains about politicians ‘talking through their hat’. The phrase means, of course, that what is said makes no sense and is incoherent nonsense. It’s American in origin, first recorded in the New York World in 1888. No one can say with any confidence where it comes from. However, the best suggestion is that it originally painted an image of a person holding their hat over their mouth so that their words were muffled and incoherent. Certainly possible.