The League of the Just ...

The weekend is closing in and individual summer holidays are starting or ending. Various last-minute headaches are passed onto my desk, from people who are either on the brink of going away or recently returning to an overflowing inbox (and not just from Facebook notifications).

One of the few sensible observations in Theodore Dalrymple's otherwise dismal book Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass is the way felons use the word "just" to minimise the seriousness of their crimes, as in "it was just a poxy fractured skull".

Countless people in the modern workplace deploy the same technique, as in "would you mind just having a quick look at this before close of play today?" Before long even purists like myself are doing it too, just prior to requesting something absurdly inconvenient.

There's no justice, there's just "just".