Mincing

The outrage at what must surely be a homophobic attack on Christopher Pyne by Julia Gillard seems to be gathering speed slowly, with an Age editorial today.

"Mincing" - not a word you hear much these days. Because, I would have thought, the concept didn't have much traction these days, being really akin to mannered, cultivated, and, of course, queer, all words that had acquired a more meliorative connotation since the days in the seventies when I was regularly (well, twice) threatened for having long hair. Not a word that, one would have thought, sprang readily to the tongue on the trot; therefore probably an attack she must have prepared beforehand, which is even odder, because she would surely have realised that gays are basically a core progressive/labor constituency - to the extent, I suppose, that Labor can regularly kick them in the teeth on the grounds that they don't have any other home to go to.