"Gammon:" The Latest Leftist Hate Pejorative

We all know that the worst thing in the world today is the racist-sexist-homophobe white supremacist next door. But maybe there is something worse.

See, in Britland today the educated-gentry lefties have invented a new pejorative: "Gammon."

What in the world is "gammon," you ask? I will tell you. Here is Brendan O'Neill at Spiked!

Mainly aimed at angry men of a certain age who are pro-Brexit and possibly a bit iffy about mass immigration, this fleshiest of epithets reduces people to lumps of meat. Pig meat, at that. It is the closest any side in our maddening culture war has got to likening human beings to animals.

Get it? Gammon is pig meat. Or, as the OED says "The ham or haunch of a swine." But it also means "the lashing of a bowsprit." And the game of backgammon. And in thieves' slang, to gain someone's attention while another is robbing him. And it also means "to talk (plausibly or persuasively)." Or, "to feign, pretend." Or "to stuff with ridiculous nonsense, to humbug, deceive, hoax."

When referring to working-class middle-aged white males that the educated graduate might encounter in a pub, the pejorative dramatizes the likelihood that the said "gammon" may get red in the face, like the actual pig-meat product available at your local butcher's. The pejorative was created back during the "Brexit Wars" about whether Britain should leave the European Union.

According to Brendan O'Neill, the pejorative is really a reflection of the confusion and disorientation that the graduate left experienced in Britain during and after the Brexit vote -- and indeed in the demolition of the "red wall" of working class Labour constituencies in the North of England in the 2019 British General Election.

It can't be that the policies of the educated gentry of the last century has created divisions and winners and losers, and indeed has victimized the very people that the left claims to represent.

I think that the current wokism, the cancel culture, the left-wing street thugs, the new pejoratives invented every day by our educated betters: all these things issue from the fact that the glorious certainties of the last century are crumbling.

And when the glorious certainties are crumbling the chaps who rode the wave -- we thought it would never end -- cannot believe what is happening.

It's not a problem for me, oh no. As a naive Kantian I believe that we cannot know things-in-themselves, that everything is a crude theory that papers over the cracks, and that one day there will be a minor earthquake and the cracks will reappear.

So I go through life wondering about what cherished assumption will get demolished tomorrow.

And I laugh at my lefty friends that think they have it all figured out. Not to their faces, of course.

And I hope that we can get to the next regime without too much of a butcher's bill.

But that's how politics and religion and science work. Part of it is an attempt to understand reality. Part of it is an attempt to convince ourselves that we have everything figured out and there is no need to change the benevolent and compassionate arrangements that so benefit us, the shimmering, glowing stars in the political firmament. And part of it is an attempt to imagine how much better left, the universe, and everything could be. If Only.

And part of it is a cowardly and base attempt to blame everything on some pathetic scapegoat. Like the "gammon" in the local pub.