The National:

YOU may have seen the term “gammon” clogging up your timeline recently. A word that has grown in popularity in recent months.

Some have been savouring its use, seeing it as a clever way of encapsulating a certain breed of individual – namely, right-leaning, middle-aged white males – while others have been getting all salty about it, saying the term is a racial slur.

Gammon is being used as a pejorative to describe those who have benefited most from the system complaining about that very system. The type of men that reaped in all the benefits as baby boomers but who now shake a raging fist at the modern world and everything that’s wrong with it. Their face reddening into a hue of pink in the process, a slight shimmer caused by beads of sweat – giving them the appearance of a slab of gammon found under the hot lamp at Toby Carvery.

Think of those roasters in the audience of Question Time, one of which invariably ends up receiving airtime and who uses it to complain about “kids today”.

Though it may seem a recent phenomenon, some excellent digging has uncovered that the term was actually used as such way back in 1839 by one Charles Dickens.

“Mr Gregsbury’s political conduct, it did not enter enough into detail; and one gentlemen in the rear did not scruple to remark aloud, that, for his purpose, it savoured rather too much of a ‘gammon' tendency,” he wrote.

More to follow once we've had some dinner.