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Mind your language

The murky origins of David Cameron’s new favourite phrase

Leaps in the dark from death to Brexit

5 March 2016

9:00 AM

5 March 2016

9:00 AM

‘They all laughed at Christopher Columbus,’ sang my husband flatly, ‘when he said the world was round.’ I wasn’t going to tell him yet again that George and Ira Gershwin were wrong and everyone knew the world was round when Columbus set off. But there is a connection between Columbus’s name and the leap in the dark that he took in his voyage — and which David Cameron says ‘outers’ want to take today.

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