Stephen Fry, presenter of Fry’s English Delight, a BBC Radio 4 series about the English language, landed himself in trouble recently with his own choice of words. He was on a US chat show talking  about “trigger warnings”. These are warnings issued by universities when it is thought the subject matter of lectures or performances might reignite the trauma experienced by students with histories of abuse. Like many, he was scathing about the idea, but he also criticised those who had been abused.

He talked about a hypothetical case in which a student could not watch Titus Andronicus or read Macbeth because “it might trigger something when you were young that upset you once, because uncle touched you in a nasty place”. He went on: “It’s a great shame and we’re all very sorry that your uncle touched you in that nasty place – you get some of my sympathy – but your self-pity gets none of my sympathy because self-pity is the ugliest emotion in humanity.”

The ugliest emotion? Fry was attacked across the internet and had to explain himself to Mind, the mental health charity of which he is president. It was the phrase “self-pity” that did the damage. But even “pity” is a problematic word. Why is a kind of emotion so often received as an insult?