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Early one morning in the famously hot winter of 20** a figure could be seen walking between the tallest obelisks and ziggurats of the walled Republic of Urbs-Ludus. He was looking for the Palace of the Golden Gates and was assured he would not miss it. He was a lean man in his middle forties, of more than average height but lacking hair. Though most of the people he passed pretended not to feel the heat and remained buttoned-up and scarfed, he carried his overcoat over his shoulder. Something about him – it could have been his shaved head, for this was a society that set great store by fantastical coiffure – suggested intransigence and maybe even a fall from authority. He was Professor Kolskeggur Probrius and had, until the year previously, been head of Phonoethics, a university research programme looking into the importance of language to ethical thinking. The words we used and the way we expressed them, he argued, affected the thoughts we had and the actions we took. ‘Bad grammar leads to bad men’ hardly does justice to the subtlety of his thinking, but that was the gist of it.

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