In the wake of the “defeat” of Britain’s Conservative party this week, a former senior government official made the following remark:

“Theresa May is a dead woman walking,” George Osborne, whom May fired as chancellor of the exchequer last year and now edits London’s Evening Standard newspaper, told BBC Television on Sunday. “It’s just how long she’s going to remain on death row.”

Clearly my postings have been powerless to instill sensitivity to the power of metaphor.  With Trumpian-inspired rhetoric swirling loudly and venomously, the corrosive spread of eerie rhetoric into commonplace discourse is upon us.  To call out George Osborne’s rhetoric is to deal with gnats. To call out deadened rhetoric generally is to resist the sustenance that gnats provide to more formidable bugs.