Anyone reading the broadsheets these days won’t have long to wait before they trip over the word “discourse”. The Guardian is full of stuff about “the climate discourse”; The Telegraph talks about “popular discourse” in Syria; in The Independent a book reviewer bemoans “the objectionable discourse about national cultural purity”. A word that once was largely the preserve of academics is now bemusing the rest of us.It’s not a new word, of course: it has just acquired a new meaning. It comes ultimately from the Latin discurrere, “to run in all directions”. Thoughts and words, as well as people, could range widely. So it was that in Middle French, the word discors, later discours, meant a treatise, sermon or speech. Its