Harvey Weinstein. Kevin Spacey. James Toback. Ben Affleck. Dustin Hoffman. Michael Fallon. I could go on and on. The last few weeks have revealed just how widespread sexual harassment is; how deeply it is embedded in our definition of normal. The last few weeks have made the issue impossible to avoid, and yet the language we use to talk about sexual harassment is often designed to do just that. It’s designed to avoid responsibility and avoid taking the issue seriously. It’s designed to gaslight victims and make them feel as if they’re overreacting. Like it’s their fault or like they just can’t take a joke. With every new set of allegations there comes the same old catalogue of cliches. I’ve collected a few of the most used and abused of these here, along with their definitions. Please find below a glossary of ways to gloss over gross misconduct.

A Different Time: A couple of decades ago, back in the olden days, pretty much anything went. Racism was fine, sexism was sexy and touching people inappropriately was normal. This was A Different Time; a time when men were men and women were non-sentient birth machines. Any sexual misconduct that may have happened in A Different Time was automatically OK and should be immediately forgiven. Basic decency didn’t exist in the years pre-PC, you see. Human beings were still basically savages. I mean, people wore ultra-wide bell bottoms, for God’s sake, they clearly weren’t in their right minds.

Alcohol: An intoxicating substance that inexplicably makes sexual assault victims responsible for everything that happened to them, while absolving abusers of any blame. See, for example, Kevin Spacey’s “apology” in which the actor stated he didn’t remember molesting a 14-year-old Anthony Rapp 30 years ago, but (miraculously!) does remember that, if it did happen, he was definitely very drunk, so it wasn’t really his fault. As we all know, people don’t assault people, alcohol assaults people.

Father of daughters: A superior specimen of man who, having spawned female life of his own, has come to the stunning realisation that women are human, too. Often, these benevolent beings are eager to share their new knowledge with the rest of the unenlightened world: “as a father of daughters” has become a familiar refrain in any discussion of sexual harassment. In an interview with Deadline, for example, Matt Damon, who has been accused of knowing about Weinstein’s abuse, defended himself by saying that “as the father of four daughters, [Weinstein’s] is the kind of sexual predation that keeps me up at night”. Not every father of daughters is as tirelessly passionate about women’s rights as Matt-can’t-sleep-at-night-Damon. Weinstein, for example, has four daughters. Woody Allen married Mia Farrow’s adopted daughter. Donald Trump has repeatedly sexually objectified his daughter Ivanka. But, hey, it’s the exceptions that prove the rule!

Good-Natured Groping: There are many grey areas when it comes to groping and it’s important one understands their various nuances and doesn’t rush to put all unsolicited groping into the same disgusting-pervert box. For example, if you are an old man in a wheelchair who grabs a woman’s bottom while joking that your favourite magician is “David Cop-a-feel”, then this isn’t Bad Groping, which is gross, it’s Good-Natured Groping, which is, you know, good-natured. Just ask George HW Bush. In response to sexual assault allegations the former president’s team released a statement explaining that “to try to put people at ease, the president routinely tells the same joke – and on occasion, he has patted women’s rears in what he intended to be a good-natured manner”. And, I mean, this makes total sense. What could put a person more at ease than a man from one of the most powerful families in the world unexpectedly grabbing their buttocks while making an unamusing homophonic pun?

Nonconsensual sexual penetration: A useful term to use when you really mean rape but don’t want to call a rapist a rapist. The thing about rape is that it’s a horrible word. It’s very direct. It leaves no room for misunderstanding. When you smother the concept in syllables, however, it softens it. This legalese sounds a lot more technical and a lot less violent than rape. A man called Brett Sokolow, who has made a name (and a lot of money) for himself by offering US universities advice on sexual misconduct, picked up on this a while ago. In a 2014 interview with al-Jazeera America, Sokolow explained how, while touring universities over a decade ago, he noticed campuses were very “squeamish” about the word rape and sexual misconduct hearing boards were unwilling to label offenders as rapists. So he tested the phrase “nonconsensual sex” with focus groups and found that it made people a lot more comfortable than a nasty word like rape. Now it has become standard terminology – Sokolow estimates that between 700 and 800 campuses have adopted the language in their sexual misconduct policies. And thank God for that. What a disaster it would be if we used language that made rapists, sorry I mean nonconsensual sexual penetrationists, uncomfortable!