The French call it the wit of the staircase. It’s the sublime retort that comes to you when it’s too late. You’re already going down the stairs, far from where the outrage took place, and you hit your forehead as you realise what you should have said. As Malta becomes increasingly outrageous, out on the streets and in the corridors of power, many of us feel speechless, although we hanker to administer some tough verbal medicine to the ubiquitous offenders. In this age of continual education, is there no course that can teach us how to lash the hacks? Do we need to keep repeating the tired insults which have long lost their cathartic power? Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you William Shakespeare, master of the full-throated, tonsil-vibrating, chest-clearing, bowel-purging insult. His works are a trove of prêt-â-porter wit. And, with just a little practice, Shakespeare demonstrates how you can do what he did: invent new words and expressions fit for every occasion. You may be one of the unfortunates whose schooldays left you with the impression that Shakespearean language boils down to thee and thou, methinks and forsooth. But Shakespeare used 20,000 words in his collected...
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