Rogues: a rant.

We've been having an exciting time in Britain. The British voted to leave the European Union three years ago, but most of the people whose job it is to sort out all the legal details don't want to leave the European Union, and so they've been trying to wangle their way out of it.

It's caused a certain amount of ill-feeling.

Anyway, the latest piece of legal cunning that's come forward as a possibility is that Parliament will be prorogued (that is, suspended) until after the leaving-the-EU deadline has passed, and that means there'll be nothing that Parliament can do about it.

What will actually happen, of course, I have no idea at all, but the whole process of leaving (or not leaving) has been made much clearer by a simple hyphen. It occurred in the Telegraph newspaper comments section and spoke of Parliament being pro-rogued.

Pro-rogued: designed to encourage rogues, obviously.

And, you know something? It seems to me that it's the pro-rogueing of Parliament that's caused most of the problems in the first place.

Word To Use Today: pro-rogue. Or prorogue. Pro- means in favour of, supporting, and comes from the Latin prō, which means forward, or onward or away; prorogue comes from the Latin prorogāre, from prō- which means in this case publicly and rogare, to ask. No one is quite sure where the word rogue comes from, but it appeared in the 1500s and might be linked to rogāre in the sense of to beg.