Prostitute is a noun and a useful descriptive term, but is it the right word to use in a headline reporting the death of a woman? “Another prostitute murdered” — yes, she was murdered and she was a prostitute, but she was a woman first, a woman of whom you could have said so many things if you had known her, only one of which was that she worked as a prostitute.

I am not advocating euphemism. Woolly words such as “sex worker” will soon attract the same opprobrium as the terms they replace, and lose their wool. Nor am I suggesting we hide what those women in Suffolk did for a living. It is central to the case, it is what has linked the murders, and in a grisly way it fascinates. Any report should be unsparing and the language honest.

But in the headline, in the opening sentence, couldn’t we at least start by calling a victim what she mainly was: a woman? Some words seem to push a person away, to make them other than us. We ignore our common humanity when in the very naming of a person we launch straight into a descriptive term drawing attention to difference and inviting shame.

• A friend in Moscow calls. We talk about the polonium-210 poisoning, about the harassment of Shell oil, about the cult of Vladimir Putin’s personality. He tells me that Russia’s a riveting place to be these days: at the same time worrying, yet strangely thrilling. He wonders what it was like to be alive in Germany in the 1930s, aware of a drift towards something intangibly nasty yet at a loss to identify any one event, one development, the loss of any one defining liberty, which might provoke a citizen to say “now we have tipped into totalitarianism”.

  The drawing of personal lines — the “so far and no farther” marks — to establish for ourselves where is the point past which a bad or bullying government would become an evil one is a devilishly tricky business: so much more obvious in retrospect than at the time. My friend says there is no doubting President Putin’s democratic credentials, if by “democratic” you mean “widely popular”. He says things are fine if, like most people, you’re ethnically Russian and keep out of trouble; you remain a free citizen living in what, for you, remains a fairly free country. But it’s getting really tough for some of the others.

  Is this any of our business? How serious is it? How worried should we be? Columnists don’t usually have much difficulty developing opinions on things — in the immortal words of the Bishop of Southwark this week, “it’s what I do” — but in the case of Putin’s Russia, I honestly don’t know what to think.

• The coming into force this winter of the Age Discrimination Act has been provoking argument about whether it is fair (or even lawful under European human rights legislation) that there should be a statutory cut-off point at 65: an age at which employees who may be willing and able to carry on working can be forced to retire with no further reason given. But as with many debates, the apparent question cloaks the real one.

  When in 1946 John Parker, a minister, was sacked for no obvious reason, he asked his Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, why. “Not up to the job,” snapped the ever terse Attlee, showing him the door. This is not a recourse available to most other employers in Britain. Under current legislation they must usually, and in practice, itemise serious and definitive failures (here we go, trying to draw lines again) and prove categorical ineptitude. That an employee has lost his edge may not be, from an employment tribunal’s viewpoint, demonstrable.

  Very, very gradually, as we age, we lose our edge. We all do. We do it at different rates, we can successfully fight it for a while, and sometimes we can hide it or compensate in other ways. But nobody is as good at 70 as at 48. “You’ve lost your edge”, however, “you aren’t as good as you were” or “you haven’t quite got what it takes” is not ground for dismissal.

  The whole culture of mandatory retirement ages (and the burgeoning agency-employees sector too, as well as the hounding of employees into resigning voluntarily) has grown up in an attempt to get around the difficulty of dismissing someone simply because he isn’t, or isn’t any longer, particularly good at his job.

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