Oh dear. Hundreds of millions of India’s citizens, it seems, would be in danger were its farmers allowed to grow genetically modified brinjal.

That is rubbish. Hundreds of millions of Americans, North and South, have been eating GM foods since 1996, and there is no evidence that even one has suffered even a stomach pain. Most of the other alleged ill-effects are equally fictitious, or, at best, hypothetical.

I once pointed this out in an article for The Economist, which its then business editor refused to print. In vain did I urge upon him that genetic modification, like it or not, was the biggest change in what is still a vital industry since farming was invented. He was unmoved. Such is the power of prejudice.

Or so I suspected. Maybe the objection was to me, not to GM. Or it may merely be that he knew better than I did what would interest his readers. One thing, though, is certain: prejudice indeed has huge power, and words — here I’m back to my genetically modified muttons — are its basic weapons.

“Sticks and stones”, runs an old rhyme, “may break your bones, but words will never hurt you.” That, of course, is rubbish too: words lead soon to sticks and stones, and then Auschwitz or Partition massacres or machetes in Rwanda. And the GM issue has produced one of the sharpest weapons. It was invented by the wrong side, to my eyes (or prejudices), but I can’t deny its brilliance. Whoever first called GM foods Frankenfoods was a liar but a genius.

Let loose

The myth of Frankenstein’s monster began life in a novel by Mary Shelley, the poet’s second wife. The word Frankenstein has passed into our language. It’s usually given to the monster, rather than his creator, thus named by Mrs Shelley. That’s wrong, but so be it: language is no respecter of history, it’s simply how we talk, and if enough of us come to say green when we mean pink, one day we’ll be right. Frankenstein, in common use, means a monster who, once created and let loose, turns upon its maker.

Hence Frankenfoods. Craftily misallied to the saying “You are what you eat”, it offers a hideous picture of GM-eaters transformed into monsters: walking insecticide containers (a natural insecticide called Bt is the key component of most GM plants) or fish/tomato hybrids (researchers tried to give the vegetable the cold-resistance of an Arctic flounder). OK, even Greenpeace knows this is fantasy; GM aside, rice-eaters do not turn into grain, nor fish-eaters grow scales (pace the reader — his name was Singh — who saw a factual basis for Bernard Shaw’s joke, cited in an earlier column of mine, that, given English spelling, fish could be written as ghoti). But it is persuasive fantasy.

It exemplifies a basic rule of hate-speak: keep it simple. Best if you have one rude epithet ready to hand; Jew did the job for centuries in Europe, even spawning the English verb jew, to cheat. If not, invent one. British English has many: frog, wog, dago, eyetie (that is, Italian), gyppo (as in gypsy, and father of gyp, also meaning to cheat), Paki, Nazi, fascist, Red and more. And don’t worry about its truth: if you dislike Obama’s healthcare plan, call him a commie. Or even its relevance: when my dog once peed on a man’s car tyre, he blasted me as a heathen. He wasn’t, I think, suggesting that I worship dogs. Nor would bastard have implied that my parents weren’t husband and wife.

All this is sorry stuff. Yet, as a devotee of language-as-tool, not as flannel, I have to confess a sneaking respect for it. The words are clichés, their users — well, what epithet shall I use? Yet they achieve their dubious purpose. And some like Frankenfoods do it brilliantly.