Musing on Australian captain Michael Clarke’s sledging of Jimmy Anderson – “Get ready for a broken f****** arm” – brought to mind a recent anecdote from the tailend of a tv tribute to Cliff Morgan.

Cliff Morgan, for any who’ve not come across the man, was a supreme rugby player who later joined that elite group of commentators, along with the likes of Bill McClaren, Dan Maskell and Peter Arnott – possessed of an almost zen-like equanimity and ‘at-ease-ness’. He recounted a story told him over a boozy dinner on a Lions tour by Irish Titan Willy John McBride. Having been set the task of defining Lions’ nationalities, McBride described seeing an English player savagely stomped by an All Black, rising to his feet with blood streaming down his face, and cheerfully offering his hand to his assailant. “So I says to him, Jeez, the way you shook the guy’s hand after what he’d done…I don’t know how you do it. I would’ve popped the feller. ‘You wouldn’t understand,’ he said to me, ‘I wanted to make him feel like a cad.’”

Does any other language have a word that equates to ‘cad’? I rather suspect not. Then again, does English? In truth, the word is so utterly integral to a particular ethos, that it is now to all intents and purposes dead. No-one, surely, has used it in a non-ironic sense since that ethos was ridiculed into obsolescence back in the ‘60s by the young turks of TWTWTW and Monty Python. In 50 years, probably, no-one will understand it at all.