If the death of one Margaret Thatcher has served to remind us that the present crisis has its roots back in the 80s on her watch, one of things that Thatcherism was responsible for was the corruption of the value of words. It may seem trivial compared to her other feats, but replacing terms like 'passenger’ with 'customer', or calling Vice-Chancellors 'Chief Executives', was an important part of the conquest of the public sphere by neoliberal ideology. I'm reminded of this by having to grapple again with something I've written about before: the REF—on which the next round of university research funding depends and for which submissions are being busily prepared—and especially the new ‘impact’ agenda. The very word ‘impact’ has now become an odious one, emptied of its former richness of meaning, reduced to a code word with arcane referents.

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