ALTHOUGH I am a Scot, Glasgow University graduate and multi-linguist, I was slightly surprised but delighted and honoured when asked by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to be part of their panel to discuss new entries into the 2020 edition.

The new entry we were asked to define was the word “Brexiteer.”

I was the sole Scot on the panel but after intensive and what my English fellow panellists described as “robust, energetic, turbo-charged, rolled-up-sleeves, do-the-right-thing, get-this-done” discussions, we eventually came up with the following, to be made public next week.

I was not supposed to reveal this in advance. In that case, I may be considered a “whistleblower” but I believe I am simply doing the right thing by informing the public in case any changes to our agreed definitions are pushed through by politically-motivated panellists.

Here’s the definition we agreed on. Since our conceptions became more varied as we proceeded, we could not settle on a single definition and therefore decided to list them with bullet-points.

Brexiteer

1.Someone who believes Britain is not a small island 21 miles from Europe, but an Empire far more powerful than the United States, Russia or China will ever be.

2.Someone who believes that Britain is basically England with a couple of troublesome appendages.

3.Someone who believes Britain won two wars alone, not with Americans, French résistants, Canadians, Australians, Polish or Czechoslovakian Spitfire pilots, Russians, Jamaicans, Gurkhas, Indians, Nepalese. Not even with a single bit of help from the Kurds who didn’t even walk across Europe to help us on D-Day.

4.Someone who is offended by Polish immigrants although Polish, not British forces were the ones to conquer Monte Cassino in 1944.

5.Someone who is old, either bald or with bleached pink hair, and likely to die before the next election.

6.Someone who finds themselves reluctantly in a European capital, can’t find roast beef and Yorkshire pudding, and so comes back speaking of “foreign muck – or mook.”

7.Someone who goes “abroad” – usually to an EU country -- and has trouble deciding between which seaside restaurant in those places offers the cheapest “full English.”

8.Someone who believes Nigel Farage cares more about “the people” than any political ambition whatsoever even though he earns many times more than “the people” by sitting in the EU parliament, on full pay and expenses, while never attending any EU committee meetings.

9.Someone who believes Boris Johnson had no interest in being prime minister, despite what he and his father said when Boris was 10, and that Boris fully deserved every one of the 95,000 votes which made him the Prime Minister of our nation of 66 million souls.

10.Someone who thinks that Boris Johnson is not a spoilt buffoon but the right man to fight with blood, sweat and tears against European “colonialists,” especially Angela Merkel who has her eyes on making Ireland, north and south, part of an expanding Germany.

11.Someone who sincerely thinks that Donald Trump will, for the first time in his presidency and against all his natural instincts, give another country (e.g. the UK) a trade deal which benefits the other country more than the U.S.

12.Someone who wants the UK to “rule the waves” again although the UK’s only decent boats these days are berthed tourist attractions and the only serious weapons in the UK are American and based at Faslane.

13.Someone who was part of one-third of the British electorate but doesn’t take into consideration that another third were opposed to Brexit, and the other third were either content with the status quo or had no idea what Brexit was or how to spell it.

Since we are the Oxford English Dictionary, we should point out that both the word “Brexiteer” and the concept are very much English. We neither expect nor induce the Northern Irish, Welsh, Scots or other better-educated people to have to abide by our definition of the word “Brexiteer.”

At our next meeting, we shall be discussing the Oxford English Dictionary definitions of Remoaner and Remoaniac.

Since I may be accused of being a whistleblower, I was advised by my lawyer to use a pseudonym which has historically put our English neighbours off the scent of a Scotsman.