The British public has been gratefully exposed to almost every conceivable way of insulting the EU, but Boris Johnson has offered a novel one. Johnson, who gave a key speech on Brexit this week, calls the EU a “teleological construction”; it is “ends-driven”, towards total political unity. In ancient Greek philosophy, teleology is the study of things that have a purpose or are directed towards a goal (telos). So beware the goal those foreigners are plotting towards! Shun teleological constructions!

But this polysyllabic dogwhistle to the paranoid is just fallaciously redundant – because absolutely every construction is teleological. If you do not keep in mind the end-state of a robust habitation, you won’t build a very good house. Everything humanmade is a teleological construction. So too are social institutions such as the EU, Ukip, and Islamic State.

Listeners might therefore suspect that this was an example, not unheard-of with this speaker, of an attempt to bamboozle the populace with pseudo-erudition. In that sense, Johnson’s phrase “teleological construction” is itself a teleological construction, with the specific and sole end of his own glorification.