Some traditions are more colourful than others. A top guy swearing for all the world to hear is one of those. The top guys being American presidents, right down to Joe Biden. But Mr Biden seems to be refreshingly old-fashioned within the ‘let-it-fly’ tradition — perhaps derived from what is known as the ‘true feelings theory’ — since he is known to apologize personally after he lets slip an occasional S*B on the mike. He is also firmly set against swearing before women and children. Which is rather charming, since he comes from a long line of presidents for whom f**king or a**hole were expressions of mere annoyance, while true ire required picturesquely memorable terminology, almost Captain Haddock-style. Neither the legendarily handsome John F. Kennedy nor the cherubic-faced Bill Clinton was colourless in this regard, although the admittedly original phrases spewed by Donald Trump and his generic forebear in this accomplishment, Richard Nixon, often revealed biases unbefitting the leader of the free world. ‘Expletive deleted’ became a commonplace of reportage after Watergate. Nixon pointed back to Lyndon B. Johnson as far more ‘potty-mouthed’, just as Barack Obama, while confessing he cursed too much, said his advisors were worse, so it was not too bad.

So did American presidents begin cursing and swearing only in the 20th century? Not quite, anecdotal history would suggest, it is just that technology had not caught up with the cursing. There was no audiotape at the time of Abraham Lincoln, although he was not blameless either. Andrew Jackson, years before Lincoln, got caught out posthumously by his pet parrot, which let off a stream of unprintables during the gathering after his death. Avian technology. But no one has honoured the tradition quite as much as Mr Obama: he called curses a stress-reliever. That is ingenuous. Its appearance of disarming frankness is laced with canny excuse-making, thus appealing to both sides of the piety line.

But this might be stretching things a bit far. If a politician from Punjab can be perceived as being faithful to north Indian culture when he confidently mouths off during a press meet, whatever else he is relieving it is not stress. To go by Mr Obama’s thesis, India’s politicians are overwrought with stress, but name-calling with rising intensity is not relieving them at all. They incline more towards Mr Trump and Nixon in their vivid formulation of targeted biases. These stresses would require a completely different kind of relief than Mr Obama was thinking of. But the former American president is not entirely off the mark. The relief of screaming ‘sugar’ — instead of ‘s**t’ of course — is indescribable, when a pet parrot — not Jackson’s — has succeeded in nibbling through the television cable. Or shouting that the usurper is ‘a nonsense’ when overtaken from the flank in a queue after three hours of waiting for a ticket for a cricket match. That is bliss unalloyed.