Most people believe in social justice, don’t they? But be careful how you express that belief or you are likely to be on the receiving end of one of the insults of the moment. “Social justice warrior”, or SJW, started in the internet and can now be found all over the place. It has been used 180 times on The Guardian’s website in the past year, and was added to Oxford Dictionaries’ online edition (not the OED, which requires a word to have a certain longevity) in 2015.

A “social justice warrior” is someone whose mission is to promote their concept of social justice at all costs. SJWs are alleged to be angry, intolerant and hypocritical. They pursue their campaigns through keyboard activism, colonising comments sections and retweeting “memes”. If they are warriors at all, they are armchair warriors.