I have been preoccupied of late with my day job, hence the light posting. Senior management made colossal and utterly foreseeable mistakes in a commonplace tale of human folly, known to many as the Emperor's New Clothes. As one of the little boys - in fairyland, that is - who proclaimed the nakedness of the emperor, I have been under considerable stress. I have been called a Cassandra by those with just little learning enough not to know that the noteworthy point about Cassandra was that she was right.

And the emperor has been proved naked. Even the stupid, the blind and the terminally corporate can see it. Sadly, as is so often the way, the whole affair has ended not with a bang but a whimper. My few fellow Cassandras, or little boys - age and gender are, after all, immaterial in this age of diversity - have been disappointed not to see more blood on the carpet. The emperor is gone, but has slipped out by the back door "to pursue other interests" in the namby pamby phrase. We Cassandras wanted to see him plummet past our window. Or even better, as my very British colleague put it, we wanted to see him "do the perp walk". From Wikipedia:

A perp walk, or walking the perp,^{[note 1]} is a common custom of American law enforcement, the practice of taking an arrested suspect through a public place at some point after the arrest, creating an opportunity for the media to take photographs and video of the event. The defendant is typically handcuffed or otherwise restrained, and is sometimes dressed in prison garb

I first came across the word "perp", short for perpetrator, in Patricia Cornwell's once excellent murder mysteries. I have always liked it.

All the best Americanisms are short, homely and to the point. All the worst are long, abstract and circumlocutory. We British adopt too many of the latter and not enough of the former. We should all do the perp walk.

Let's do the perp walk again: