2022 has only just got started, yet already, thanks to Dominic Cummings, we have learned the word of the year. Cummings confirmed that he had given evidence in writing to the Sue Gray inquiry into the lockdown-busting parties in Downing Street and added that other damning stories about Johnson will continue to come out over the next few days until Johnson is gone, saying: "It's clear talking to people in No 10 and 70 Whitehall that many officials are desperate to shove the kunlangeta off the ice this week."  

Kunlangeta is indeed a great word to describe Johnson, and indeed many others in this woeful Conservative government. It comes from the Central Alaskan Yupik language of north-west Alaska. Some reports mistakenly claim that it is an Inuit word. The Inuit language, whose major Canadian variety is called Inuktitut, is a vast dialect chain stretching from Alaska across northern Canada to Greenland. The Alaskan and Greenlandic ends of this chain, known as Inupiaq and Kalaallisut respectively, are not mutually intelligible.

Contrary to popular belief, the language of the Inuit is only one of the languages spoken by the peoples formerly known as Eskimo. Only speakers of one of the dialects in the Inupiaq-Inuktitut-Kalaallisut dialect chain are Inuit. The other main grouping comprises the Yupik peoples of far-eastern Siberia and Alaska, who are not Inuit. Central Alaskan Yupik or Yugtun is one of the five Yupik languages – the others are Pacific Yupik, Siberian Yupik, Sireniki and Naukan.

Kunlangeta (which is pronounced koon-lan-getta) is a Yugtun word which means a person who lies, cheats, deceives and takes sexual advantage of women, according to a 1976 study by Jane M Murphy, who was an anthropologist at Harvard University. The word was further defined as a person who knows what the right thing to do is but out of self-interest does not do it.

The kunlangeta is also known as a person who never improves their behaviour, no matter how many times the elders talk to them; they are incorrigible and irremediable, and their motives and behaviour remain selfish regardless of who or what is harmed.

This is all highly typical behaviour of the Conservative Party. They are entirely motivated by what is in their own interests, no matter how it might damage anyone else.

Murphy asked a Yupik elder what the group would typically do with a kunlangeta, and he replied: "Somebody would have pushed him off the ice when nobody else was looking." This is the source of Cummings's quip.

It is now known that Met Police officers guarding Downing Street have also given evidence to Sue Gray, and one Tory insider told the Telegraph newspaper that this included damning evidence of parties that Johnson and his wife held in their expensively refurbished Downing Street flat. Well, if you've managed to get a Tory party donor to cough up thousands of pounds for a couple of rolls of wallpaper, you're going to want to show off your new decor to the other kunlangetas.

The Telegraph's source claimed that they would be surprised if Johnson is still Prime Minister by the end of this week.

Given the constant drip-drip of damaging stories in the press in recent days, it appears that there are indeed many in the Conservative Party who seek to push the kunlangeta off the ice. However, the problem for the rest of us is that they only seek to push the kunlangeta off the ice because they too are kunlangetas. The Yupik push the kunlangeta off the ice for the good of the village; the Tories are doing it because Johnson is now impeding their own ability to act in their selfish self-interest and to continue to screw over the rest of us.

This piece is an extract from today’s REAL Scottish Politics newsletter, which is emailed out at 7pm every weekday with a round-up of the day's top stories and exclusive analysis from the Wee Ginger Dug.

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