A Cold War: a rant.

 People keep talking about a new Cold War.

Good grief. If this is a cold war then goodness knows what a hot one would look like. It would probably incinerate the whole Earth.

And it just might.

Heaven help us all.

Word To Use Sensibly Today: cold. The Cold War was so called because on the whole people weren't fighting each other. It was cold-blooded. It was bleak and depressing - and frightening at times, but looking back it was almost civilised compared with this one.

The expression Cold War was first used in the nineteenth century in a dodgy translation of a fourteenth-century work by Don Juan Manuel, who was writing about the conflict between Islam and Christianity (Manuel's description should have been translated as tepid, not cold). The term was re-used at various points during World War II, and then George Orwell established it as a description of the USSR-Western stand-off soon after it.

The word cold was ceald in Old English. The Old High German form of the word is kalt.