There’s no escaping it: polygamy has an image crisis. Try as it might, it cannot help sounding barbaric and biblical. A big part of the problem — beyond the twinge of human rights abuse — is the word itself: it’s just too clinical to convey any real sense of fun. The adjective in particular has a veterinary tone that rips all residual appeal from the whole idea (as in, “I’m sorry, guv, the flock’ll have to be culled — you can see by their festering hooves that half of them have already turned polygamous”). Even the addition of a jaunty prefix to make it “roly-poly-gamy” fails to haul the concept of “one man, multiple mothers-in-law” from either the Dark Ages or Utah.

What polygamy needs, especially in the sultry heat of Malaysia and Indonesia, is an ice-cool rebranding. Strip “polygamy” from the dictionaries and give the noble old institution that served Solomon and Krishna so well a swish, net-ready handle for the digital 21st century.

Something along the lines of H@rem, Maxi-Nup or iWed6.0 should do the trick.

Here on the Equator, the debate about polygamy’s future is exactly the sort of domestic ding-dong I imagine breakfast to be like in a polygamous household: a lot of righteous, cliquey screaming as the toast quietly burns in the corner. But as the debate slowly unfolds, we should end up with two useful things: a view on where mainstream public opinion in the world’s largest population of Muslims is tending and a dollop of loony rhetoric from a part of the world where it’s always too hot to think straight.

The latest twist came earlier this week with the creation of a jolly crew in Jakarta calling itself the Men’s Coalition against Polygamy. It joins an alliance of enraged housewives and other snarling activists who see Indonesia’s marriage laws, which allow men to have multiple wives, as unbalanced and a recipe for domestic violence. That line, though, is not the coalition’s central argument: their rather flimsy charge is that the existence of polygamy “labels men as egotistical, aggressive, unfaithful and unable to control their libidos”. Maybe so, but most of us merrily tick all those boxes by simply sitting in the boozer, watching the football, bellowing at the ref and chatting up the barmaid.

The creation of the Men’s Coalition against Polygamy is a direct response to the emergence last month of the Bandung chapter of the Global Ikhwan, or Polygamy Club — an originally Malaysian group chaired by a woman and dedicated to evangelising “the beautiful side of polygamy”.

The most impressive feature of this weird guild is the traction it has achieved in Malaysian politics. Taking its cue from the manifesto of the Polygamy Club, a legislator in the northeastern state of Kelantan has formally proposed that MPs help to reduce the country’s (very limited) ranks of single mothers by marrying lots of them. Prizes should be awarded, she said, for politicians who wed their way to a large, socially responsible “quota” of wives and pay for their children to be educated.

It’s a brilliant plan, sure to be embraced heartily by male MPs in Britain as soon as they get wind of it. The benefits are obvious: a half-dozen wives a mere handclap away, and an expenses labyrinth that God himself could never unravel.

Lava louts

There are absolutely no image problems, however, in the shadowy realm of sand poaching. As any bull-necked mafioso or manicured PR man knows, the key to any good racket is a killer euphemism. Thus assassination and corpse disposal are branded as “waste recycling” on the streets of Palermo, and outright lying is known in the City as “reputational management”.

But few can be as inventive as the illicit quarrymen stealing sand at Krakatoa who have managed to come up with a phrase that stands every chance of being adopted as the mantra of global villainy.

“Disaster mitigation” sounds all fuzzy and responsible right up until you ask yourself: “Whose disaster?” Properly handled, and with silky presentation skills, anything from handing a mugger your wallet to bailing out a high street bank to chasing weapons of mass destruction in empty bunkers could be neatly packaged as “disaster mitigation”. The poverty of a prospective bank robber could be spun as a disaster in need of “bullion-based mitigation”.

Over in the Sunda Strait, between Java and Sumatra, the phrase does at least have a smidgeon of logic and a wodge of geological reports at its back. In 1883, when Krakatoa so monstrously blew its top, millions of tonnes of rubble were disgorged from the volcano’s cakehole. The sandy parts of that material have a decent commercial value, except that any quarrying of the monumental slag heap is illegal. There may be a loophole, though.

Girded with various vulcanology surveys and the statements of a handy platoon of experts, one mining company asserts that at least two million tonnes of sand and rocks from Krakatoa’s previous eruptions must be carted away (and sold) to mitigate the disaster risk of any future explosion and “minimise eruption impacts”. We’re not actually quarrying, the company says, we only pump the sand through pipes inserted 30 metres deep into the mountain slope. All these ingenious spinmeisters need to do now is team up with the chaps in the Polygamy Club and work on sprucing up the language there.

“Fidelity mitigation” might work nicely.

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