My thanks to Speccie reader Ian from Cairns for suggesting that the members of the Albanese government are post turtles. ‘Post turtle’? Here’s Ian’s explanation: ‘When you’re driving down a country road and come across a fence post with a turtle on top – that’s a “post turtle”. You know he didn’t get up there by himself, he doesn’t belong up there, he doesn’t know what to do while he’s up there. He’s elevated beyond his ability to function, and you wonder why anyone put him there in the first place.’

With all the calls for Andrew Giles to be sacked, another reader Allan writes to ask for the origin of the word ‘sacked’. The answer is that it comes from the days when tradesmen took their tools to their place of work in a sack (which they kept at their workplace for as long as they were employed there). When they were dismissed, they were handed their sack of tools by the boss. You knew a man had been awarded the DCM (Don’t Come Monday) when you saw him walk out the door carrying his sack of tools.

Adam writes to say, ‘Ben Shapiro has described the trial of Donald Trump in New York as “specious”. What is the origin of this word and what does it actually mean?’ By way of explanation, Ben Shapiro is a lawyer and columnist with the Daily Wire and he said the claim that Trump’s bookkeeping misdemeanours counted as felonies was ‘specious’. We use ‘specious’ these days to label arguments that appear superficially sound, even attractive, but, in reality, are fallacious. ‘Specious’ has a long history, arriving in English (from a Latin source) in the 1400s. Originally it meant ‘pleasing to the eye’. Later it was applied to birds or flowers that were gaudy or showy. So it evolved by stages over the centuries until it came to mean superficially attractive, while being deeply dubious.

They keep doing it! Intelligent and well-informed people say it. My Sky colleague Chris Kenny says it. I’ve even heard the great economist (and Speccie writer) Judith Sloan say it. They keep saying ‘the proof is in the pudding’. No, it’s not! You can dig into the pudding as far as you like, you won’t find any proof. It’s not in there! The proverbial phrase being mangled by everyone and his dog is ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating’. When Chaucer first recorded this expression (in 1390) ‘proof’ still meant ‘test’. You a test a pudding by eating it. The proof (both in the modern and the older ‘testing’ sense) comes from eating the thing! If you leave out the eating the proverb makes no sense. Without the ‘eating’ you prove nothing.

As more and more politicians make themselves a ‘laughing stock’ I began to wonder where the phrase came from. The ‘laughing’ part is clear enough, but what sort of stock is meant? It turns out this comes from the 1500s, from the days when a common form of punishment was being put in the stocks for a designated period. You know the sort of thing (we’ve seen this in endless historical movies and TV shows) – two planks one above the other, the top one slides up and down on the supporting posts, and there are holes for the feet of the victim. People could be locked in these stocks in a public place (such as the village green) while upright citizens gathered around, mocked them, laughed at them and even (possibly) threw rotten fruit at them. The rotten fruit is probably a bad idea, but mocking laughter is still open to us. By the way, is ‘laughingstock’ one word or two? Many dictionaries (and my computer’s spellchecker) insist on one, but the Oxford says two, and I’m putting my money on the Oxford.

You are at an event of some sort, and someone makes a remark that deserves a retort. But you can’t think of what to say. Then, in the car, on the way home, it suddenly hits you: ‘Oh, I only wish I had said….’ That is the experience the French called ‘esprit de l’escalier’, which the Collins Dictionary says: ‘Describes the predicament of thinking of the perfect retort too late.’ And it’s happened to all of us, hasn’t it? The phrase ‘esprit de l’escalier’ literally translates as ‘the spirit of the stairs’. It pictures that perfect retort that occurs to you only as you are walking down the stairs leaving the dinner party. (Mind you, it might not happen on the stairs –  you’re more likely to come up with the perfect answer just as you are falling asleep that night.) There are a whole bunch of French expressions we adopted in English (à la carte, bon appetit, fait accompli and many others). This one is slightly less familiar, but very useful!