Watch your words. They are powerful weapons and there’s a war on!

The playwright Brian Friel described his masterwork Translations as “a play about language and only about language”.

Though he confronted issues — imperialism, subjugation, and the tsunami power of love — each orbits his heartbeat theme: How our understanding of our world is shaped by how we describe it, by how the medium becomes the message.

He saw that by trying to describe one reality we sometimes, unintentionally, germinate another.

Another masterwork of the Irish tradition is ‘Fairytale of New York’, written by Jem Finer and Shane MacGowan 30 years ago. Though on a very different scale to Friel’s play, it is every bit as grand and powerful but because of the way of these things work, far more widely known.

A Christmas anthem, it is a mixture of heartbreak and hope, and optimism dashed against unmoving, indifferent reality — yet the central romance endures.

Because of the shifting snows of what societies, or at least some sections of society, deem acceptable vernacular, it has become controversial.

It has achieved this unwarranted notoriety even though the most strident advocate would struggle to convince if they suggested there is even a sliver of hostility, homophobia specifically, in its lyric.

The cruel, smearing word “faggot” is used once in the song but in the way any of us might, in a short-tempered moment, use a word we immediately regret.

It is used in a context that unambiguously highlights its inappropriateness, that clearly shows how intolerance is a consequence of derailed sensibilities.

Despite being used in a way that only those who choose not to see would regard as homophobic it is, again this

Christmas, the focus of attention from sensibilities that seem happiest in an imagined rather than an actual world.

It is as if the bizarre, oppressive, largely American notion of creating “safe places” and offering “trigger warnings” to students who might be upset by elements of their course has escaped from academia and been thrown over the public square like a gladiator’s net.

Surely we are more perceptive, surely we are more robust? Surely our understanding of free speech obliges us to be so?

If this was an isolated incident, then we could quickly turn the page but this week People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (Peta) advocated we abandon phrases that add such spice and meaning to language.

Peta suggested that “taking the flower by the thorns” should replace “taking the bull by the horns” and that “flogging a dead horse” was anachronistic.

The lobby also suggested that animals should be called “he” or “she” rather than “it” overturning millennia of Judeo Christian philosophy that defined our world’s hierarchy.

None of this would matter as much as a pine needle falling from a Christmas tree if we did not live in a post-truth age, where setting the terms, framing the vocabulary of debate, is the first step towards winning it.

Words are powerful weapons and we should be more circumspect, more respectful about how we use them — and we should certainly not be useful fools for those who knowingly use these issues to divide and conquer.