This is a bad week for the old saying that "sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me". As lip-readers and journalists continue their inquiries into the insult that caused Zinedine Zidane to flip in Berlin on Sunday night, another verbal slur is festering across the border in Poland.
Reuters news agency reported yesterday that the new Polish prime minister, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, wants the German government to act against a newspaper that called his twin brother Lech, the Polish president, "a potato".
Lest anyone wonder why grown men would be hurt by comparison with a root vegetable, Reuters explained that in Polish culture, it was "rather like calling the president a peasant". There was no offence meant to the potato, in other words. We must now wait to see if millions of Polish small farmers, who may not agree that "peasant" is a term of abuse per se, will demand an apology from the news agency.
In any case, newspaper photographs of the brothers suggest that the cause of offence might be more basic than Reuters suggests. It's just a hunch, but I suspect that when Lech and Jaroslaw were at school, cruel class-mates may have called one or both of them "potato-head". Perhaps that's why the name hurt, and perhaps the German newspaper knew this. Either way, we can only hope that the diplomatic row can be resolved without, well, blighting relations between the two countries.
Disparagement of the opposition is a standard tactic in sport, from boxing to cricket. But unless you've stolen the case file from your opponent's psychiatrist, you never know when an insult is going to hit home. It's interesting that one of the theories about why Zidane reacted so badly was that he was called a "dirty terrorist". For Republic of Ireland supporters, the phrase echoes the "dirty Fenian bastards" chant with which they were greeted by home fans at the notorious World Cup qualifier in Belfast in 1993.
Years later, covering an election day in Portadown, an Ulster Unionist supporter asked me, in a spirit of friendly dialogue between our peoples, whether the word "Fenian" was considered offensive in the South. Citing the aforementioned example, I said it depended on circumstances. In cases where the term was accompanied by other verbal hints, such as the words "dirty" and "bastard", or by visual clues - flecks of bile on the speaker's lips, and so on - then, yes, it would be seen as an insult.
But I had to admit that, deprived of such context, being dubbed a member of a 19th-century US-based liberation/terrorist movement whose most famous action was to invade Canada, twice, would not really cut the average citizen of the modern Irish republic to the quick. It was only an insult if you knew it was intended as such. And even then, you still had to make an effort to be hurt.
By contrast, the former Northern Ireland manager Billy Bingham, who encouraged the Belfast crowd that night, later claimed the home supporters had been outraged by a chant during the corresponding game at Lansdowne Road. The chant was: "There's only one team in Ireland". And if that really did rile the Northerners as much as Bingham claimed, it should demonstrate to players and supporters alike that you don't have to resort to bad language, racial epithets, or disparagement of your opponent's sister's morals to provoke an over-reaction.
Italians have suffered their share of racial slurs down the years. Several occur in a famous scene in The Godfather when, approached by the mob's lawyer for a favour, hard-boiled Hollywood producer Woltz loses his head (eerily presaging the fate that awaits his prize horse). "I don't care how many dago guinea wop greaseball goombahs come out of the woodwork," yells Woltz, assuming his visitor to be Italian. "I'm German-Irish," replies the lawyer. "Well let me tell you this, my Kraut-Mick friend," continues Woltz, recovering gamely but now slightly short of adjectives.
Perhaps drawing on Italy's reservoir of bitter experience, Marco Materazzi cunningly undermined inquiries into the Zidane insult by insulting himself. Denying that he had called the French player a terrorist, he said: "I'm ignorant. I don't even know what the word means."
Whatever he did say, it was the proverbial red rag to a bull. In preceding games, Zidane had been more like a matador, effortlessly escaping the lunges of dumb-brute opponents who found he was never quite where they thought he was. But in one mad moment, he turned from tormentor to tormented, put his head down, and charged. The startled look on the face of Materazzi was that of a bull-fighter who, in a lapse of concentration, has forgotten to hold the cape out to one side.
It's only right that France has not been too hard on its fallen hero, without whom they wouldn't have made the final anyway. Of course, now that he has written another chapter in the epic, complex volume that is the male code of honour, there may be reasons why the French admire him even more now. Say what the world will about Zidane. But not even the Bush White House could call him a cheese-eating surrender monkey.