“Joe’s had a heart attack,” said the woman waiting at the bar.
I was in a backstreet pub, in the afternoon, listening to the chat. One of life’s greatest, guiltiest pleasures.
“Aye,” replied her friend, waiting delivery of her gin and lemon. “Heart attack or stroke, they’re not sure.”
“Is he talking, Peg?”
“Oh, he’s very inco-rent, very inco-rent.”
Words, eh? Peggy’s use of language left much to be desired – in this case a syllable.
But her friend knew what she meant and so did I.
Language adapts, shifts and changes, and never more so than when we are dealing with war, violence, terrorism and death.
And it isn’t always the case that when words are misused or confused we all know what we are talking about.
We’re under a dark psychological cloud now, another generation – after World War 2, the Cuban missile crisis, the mutually-assured and Threads-depicted nuclear destruction of the early 80s – becoming sure in its mind that one day the world will destroy itself.
And when we talk about the ‘war on terror’ we ensure that all the language beneath the umbrella of that term is distorted.
Retaliatory strikes, shoot to kill, targeted assassinations, smart bombs and unlawful combatants are all terms loaded with meaning. But they are also barriers, like a security fence. And they do no more to keep us safe.
Now, new laws are promoted to tackle “justifying or glorifying terrorism”, without irony, by administrations happy to license £1bn-worth of arms sales to Africa, who use terms like “shock and awe” to describe bombing a city and have spent two years justifying a war/invasion in which they did not even count the civilian dead. Sorry, collateral damage.
The lexicon of this ‘war’ only pushes us apart, making ‘their’ dead seem of less value than ‘ours’.
After the sickening violence of July 7 the British government reacted with constraint and respect.
But then came signs that it and us were in danger of doing what Bush did after September 11 - losing sight of the ball behind hysteria and double-talk as we worked to stop future attacks.
Shifts in tone began with the tabloids. The quest for tolerance and understanding disappeared inside the Daily Express and Daily Mail with their depictions of two of the bombers as “sponging asylum seekers”.
I’m told this reporting prompted the Welsh Refugee Council to write to the Press Complaints Commission over concerns about its affect on asylum seekers at a time when Welsh police were recording increases in racial crime.
Dr Tammy Boyce, of Cardiff School of Journalism, says: “These newspapers returned to a discourse they’d used for the past decade - asylum seekers are bad and ‘See! We told you so!’”
Populist policies followed. But after some thought the deportation of suspects – while seeking ‘no-torture’ assurances from states which the CIA send or ‘renders’ suspects to for ‘robust’ questioning – surely seems less desirable than trying and imprisoning them.
And then came the re-branding idea, to make people, somehow, reconsider their identities as ‘Asian-British’.
But why not redefine the killers instead?
The terms ‘Muslim’ and ‘Islamic’ are now so linked with ‘terrorist’ they would provide top answers in a Family Fortunes’ survey.
Somewhere a distinction has crept in that ‘good’ Muslims are those who don’t follow their faith too closely and the bad are those who do. That there is a short step from practising to indoctrination, from adherence to fanaticism. From the believer to the potential terrorist.
It’s wrong to think that this terrorism has nothing to do with Islam.
But binding the words Muslim and Islamic to terrorist to describe those who use violence against the West besmirches and endangers the 1.6 million Britons of that faith.
If we re-brand the murderers of July 7 we can be more precise in what we mean. Jihadists, is one suggestion I have heard. Is it appropriate? Is there anything better?
In a world where you are either with us or against us, the danger is we may never understand who ‘them’ and ‘us’ are.
Because nothing is that simple or straightforward. Especially language.
Let’s not become completely inco-rent to each other.

 greg_lewis@wme.co.uk