1. Other words specifically banned by Hitler’s race–haters were Zion, Hosanna, Galilee and Moses.

2. It wasn‘t even that the rousing strains of ‘Sing Hosanna to the King of Kings‘ (arranged for the Oval as ‘Ashley Giles is the King of Spain‘) were being picked out on trumpet by the barmy army maestro.

3. My local newspaper, the Oxford Times, surveyed the city‘s primary schools and found that most had abandoned traditional nativity plays, replacing them with (ugh) "modern versions of Christmas plays with less of a religious element". These have names such as Baboushka and Hosanna Rock! and feature a "small nativity section". Small this year, smaller the year after that and gone altogether the year after that, I reckon.

4. One rhetorically asked "What if Bush‘s insane, self–serving and dangerous policies do end up causing a multi–generational chain reaction in the Middle East, jump–starting the democratisation of the whole region?" To read and hear such cries of hosanna for the invasion of Iraq and its democratisation corollaries is to be reminded of the Irish litterateur Oscar Wilde‘s aphorism that "People who count their chickens before they are hatched, act very wisely, because chickens run about so absurdly that it is impossible to count them accurately." Hitherto, Iraq as the fulcrum of the transformation of the Middle East proved to be worse than what US Senator Joseph Biden called cockamamie idea; it proved to be ignis fatuus.