Thanks, dug. He started it.

In his second Today interview last week, he said that he didn't regret using the word swamping because the dictionary definition "is quite straightforward, and it is exactly the same as overwhelm or overburden, which is to be swamped with work, or overwhelmed with work". As someone said to me today, "why not just use overwhelm then, if it has exactly the same meaning?" And if people object, why not just say "OK, I mean overhwelm"? It seems that he is deliberately trying to establish a classically structuralist opposition between "people who chat" and "people I talk to".

Note also his use of the word "liberati" in the first interview.

PS I wonder how Blunkett would feel about the fact that this same person explained how she understood this way of using words by saying "it's the kind of thing Haider does in Austria"...