And the governance shall be upon his shoulders

Taboo words used to come with four letters, but if the press is anything to go by they have now been ‘super-sized’. Some would blame MacDonald’s, I blame universal education. Anyway, the latest taboo word seems to be ‘government’. Government used to be an abstract noun to describe the act of governing — running something — anything from companies, universities to countries. Politicians have had a bad press, however, so companies invented a new word — ‘governance’ — which does not mean anything different from government, but apparently avoids the association with our democratically elected representatives. In the Financial Times not long ago, this was taken to a new extreme when the policies of the British cabinet were referred to as ‘governance’. However Nature, as usual, wins the prize in an article of the 13th November, 2008, in which it referred to “the next president’s... style of governance”. If the president of the most powerful nation on the face of the earth isn’t involved in government, then clearly nobody is. Or has the religious right reserved this for Jesus Christ?