Foreign names are always a nightmare for us English. We just don’t do overseas, despite the Empire.

We tend to pronounce most vowels as “uh”, even the indefinite article “a” — uh book, uh politician, etc. Lately though, the American usage “ay” has crept in, so, ay book, ay politician. Not only is this ugly — to my ears, anyway — but it slows down a sentence and makes it sound mechanical, rather like those computers that talk back to you.

English, as she is spoke, is an organic thing, taking on board a wide array of variations, localisms — very fashionable — and just plain wrongisms.

However, the current confusion in the spelling of Arabic, and related names is a pain, especially if you have to refer to them in text form. Take the beleaguered Libyan President Muammar (is that right?) Gaddafi. The BBC spells it as at left. However, The Sunday Times reverses the number on the “d” and “f”, so Gadaffi.

Guido Fawkes manages to spell it both ways in his latest email. But then I believe his former career was in hedge funds. You can take a chap out of the City …

Does it matter? Gad—- will be gone soon, won’t he?

Usually, our sophisticated press and broadcast media arrives at a consensus and that’s that. A recent exception was The Times‘ insistence on “Taleban”, rather than Taliban. They also led the charge to do away with capital letters, as in, “the queen”. I’ve been quietly waiting for “archbishop of canterbury”, but it hasn’t happened yet. Any odds on “rupert murdock”?

Shall we settle on “Gadafi”?

Doesn’t look quite right, does it?

John Evans

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Politicians nowadays speak to us in code. If you still believe that the vacuous utterances of your average politico are nothing but sad soundbites and sugar, think again. The brew is teeming with cipher messages for fellow conspirators.

Currently it’s the crumpled Labour Party that’s responsible for more encrypted signals than GCHQ. Even the political commentators are picking up this irritating habit.

One of the more popular of the code words now doing the rounds is cojones, which is not a type of Welshman. Both Matthew d’Ancona and Andrew Rawnsley used the new “c” word yesterday.

Cojones, pronounced CO_HON_ESS in its native Spanish, has a lot to do with the driving force behind fighting bulls. And I mean behind literally. To be delicate (as we must on a family website), think of our Education Secretary as Ed Cojones. If I also say, two Eds are better than one, you should by now have interpreted my codified intent.

Not surprisingly, the main target in the cojones wars is David Miliband, that prize chump who bounced across our screens last week, grinning like a clown with a painted-on face, on the back of a dreary article in The Guardian. And, yes, the article was seen as so encrypted you’d need an Enigma machine to work it out.

Miliband is sometimes referred to as the British Obama, the Boy David, Millimetre, and, for some reason, even Millinery Hatband. Oh, I get it!

Milly is the cryptic leader of a putative coup against our Gordon, if the signals are read aright. He even answers questions about his dreary “manifesto” in double-code: “can” instead of “will” apparently carries enormous significance with the nerdy types who watch these things.

Variations on the conditional tense are also a big giveaway as in, “I have always wanted to support Gordon”. Meaning, “I haven’t quite got there yet, and it looks a bit late for that now … but I live in hope [Wink].”

Oh, the chuminess of it all. Such ripping fun all round.

Not so for William Rees-Mogg in Sunday’s Mail. After slipping up last week with “the British Obama”, he really gave the lad a smack yesterday.

“Least of all can one sympathise with teenage rebels without a cause who think it would be nice to be the next leader of the Labour Party. They seem to understand nothing about the depth of crisis in which their party and Government find themselves. Grow up or shut up is the best advice to them.”

Such invective is rarely heard from the Somerset Levels.

Liz Jones, also in the Mail, and not normally associated with the cloak and toothpick world of politics, sweetly writes that Milly could be our very own Brad Pitt. Not William Pitt, mind you, but Brad.

There’s only one obstacle to clear. His wife must look like Angelina Jolie. The fact that Ms Jones sets this hurdle, almost certainly means she doesn’t. That must be a great relief to Mrs Milly. I imagine though that Milly himself has enough vanity to rather fancy following in the footsteps of Brangelina.

I think we’ve squeezed all the juice to be had out of Milly’s cojones for one week. However, we do notice that another bandwagon (Milibandwagon? — ah, the composites available to this man) has begun to roll in favour of the other Miliband, Ed — not cojones Ed, you understand. And I’m not suggesting Ed M. doesn’t have what it takes in the boot.

You know, scribbling about British politics can get very complicated. Come back David Cameron (currently in Cornwall), all is most definitely forgiven.

Oh, and bring Occam’s razor with you, along with that big pile of psychology books.

Gordon Brown, British Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury, Leader of the Labour Party, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has had surprisingly few titles in his long 11 years in government. Some Minsters have managed to accrue almost one a year to embellish their CVs and Who’s Who entries.

Maybe he deserves another to plump out his list, even if it is an honorary gong going forward.

The title I have in mind has been available to him ever since the local elections in May and the loss of London to David Cameron’s Tories. It should certainly have been collected after the disastrous debacle in Labour’s safe seat of Crewe and Nantwich. Now, following yesterday’s cataclysmic implosion in the East End of Glasgow — the very soul of Labour’s heartland — we’re going to pin it on his chest whether he likes it or not.

Her Majesty’s Leader of the Opposition Designate.

Not that he will linger in his new job when his party is wiped out Canadian-meltdown style in the next General Election. You can be sure he will step down from politics the moment he concedes defeat. A son of the manse who built a reputation for pulling rabbits out of hats will find the absence of hats very hard to bear. Latterly, even the rabbits have deserted him.

For Gordon was the man who, as Chancellor, forged a glittering Cityscape of infrastructure to celebrate his achievements. The Golden Rule that borrowing should be for “investment” only, not for consumption. As a man without a moment’s experience of commerce in his entire life, his idea of investment was more, and yet more, state clutter.

His Borrowing Rule and his Financial Regulator were equally flawed. He’s had to send in his chief ghillie to slice them up for breakfast after they all dropped dead at the same time. Gordon’s smoke and mirrors have disappeared in a big puff of smoke.

Like many, I sometimes get a twinge of conscience in seeming so beastly to a one-eyed man who has pursued his partial vision with commendable vigour for so long. Then I recall that his 1970s-style economics was aimed at creating a client state that would, in theory, always vote Labour. The same was true for mass immigration.

The list of betrayals goes on. Signing away the country to a foreign power (as the EU will be after the Lisbon Treaty) against the wishes of a large majority of the British, and ratting on the promise of a referendum. Selling seats in the upper chamber of Parliament, and other honours, for party funding — he denied knowledge of this outrage but no-one believes him …

Eventually you get weary of compiling inventories of Brown’s failings, treacheries, errors of judgement and betrayals of trust. Like many obsessives, he bores by excess.

The electorate has already spoken. Will he go of his own volition? Brown’s tragedy is that he has no hinterland, nowhere else to go. To him, politics and life are one. Even the books he occasionally writes are intended to burnish his career prospects. Silly little tomes about courage, from a man who conspicuously has little of it. He has been labelled “yellow” by his opponents.

But he won’t go unless pushed and the Labour Party doesn’t cut down its leaders. It’s the long stalemate before checkmate.

Rudyard Kipling had a prescient little verse for our Leader of the Opposition Designate:

There’s a one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Khatmandu,
There’s a little marble cross below the town;
There’s a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew,
And the Yellow God forever gazes down.

Cartoon by Peter Brookes

Some phrases in the English language become very annoying after a while.

They begin as cute, even devastating, responses to awkward situations. The purpose of them is to confer a powerful air of superiority on the user.

One such phrase is: “What part of ‘No’ don’t you understand?”

All such sayings start life as carefully crafted one-liners by wags in the press, usually half-decent writers, or cerebral contributors to those erudite TV panel shows. An osmotic process ensures they are swiftly deployed by every journalist, editor and media performer in the land.

Then, following a brief moment of triumph, they fade away, almost as quickly as they appeared. They have turned into cliche, and real writers know they are now virtually unusable … by them, at least.

But that’s not the end of it. Ordinary, non-media people pick them up as smart things to say when pressed. Endless TV vox pop interviews — popular because they don’t have to be paid for — are now filled with the dreaded words: “What part of ‘No’ don’t they understand?”

The Irish “No” vote in the EU referendum on Friday has resurrected this tired old bit of phraseology. It’s all over the newspapers again. Even hoary TV commmentators are using it — usually as a quote from someone else to give themselves deniability. The WPONDYU challenge is having its day in the sun.

Have we at Syntagma ever used it? Once or twice a moon or two ago. The problem with it is that it’s rather authoritarian. If someone barks it at you, you’ll know what I mean. It conjures up a particularly abusive school master or a militant feminist responding to an idle pass.

As a public service I have carefully crafted a witty response to What part of “No” don’t you understand? Here it is:

“It’s the ‘N’ that puzzles me. It gets it off to a very poor start.”

Okay, it’s not Oscar Wilde, but then I have nothing to declare but my lack of genius.

We have a new policy here at Syntagma not to post on April 1st because whatever we write our readers are going to unpack it for the catch / joke / scam.

Of course I have to post today to tell you about the new policy, and you may think that’s a bit of an April Fool situation in itself.

The fact is, you can’t win on April 1st. It’s like being overshadowed by a dark angel.

Look up now and you may just see it.