The Big Covid Vaccine Question: Is it jab or jag? – Susan Morrison

Someone is having a delightful time putting stickers on lamp-posts and walls announcing that Covid is a hoax, the vaccines are dangerous, and forcing people to wear masks is the worst affront to our civil liberties since Oliver Cromwell banned Christmas.

Someone else, and I think we can all guess who, is having an even more delightful time taking them down and putting them in the bin. Tip to the sticker sticker. Don’t put them on sandstone walls. The stick doesn’t work, and they are easy to peel off. Me, I like a challenge.

I haven't had this much fun since the National Front went on a deranged poster campaign on Stirling University campus and Fiona MacGregor and I spent a cider-fueled night taking them all down.

Ah, children, fighting right-wing propaganda was easier back then. Sticky-backed plastic was for Blue Peter. The campus only allowed Blu-tac on university walls. Say what you like about your far-right nutter in the late 70s, they obeyed campus rules. Well, the one who went to Stirling Uni did.

The vaccine misinformation on the stickers is the written equivalent of the know-nothing drunk picking a fight in a pub. And anyway, the Phantom Sticker-Upper is missing the true vaccine controversy.

Is it “jag” or “jab”? My Southern friends are confused. Can’t think why. Surely everything that sticks into you is “jaggy”?

Remember the Rubella vaccination at school? That was a jag. When Angela Prentis fainted, Miss Brown told the headmaster, before the whole class, that it was because she’d just had her "jag”. Miss Brown was a St Andrews First Aider. Therefore, she had a medical background and knew the correct terminology.

A syringe is prepared with Covid vaccine before someone gets their 'jag', or should that be 'jab'? (Picture: Andreas Solaro/AFP via Getty Images)

Actually, Angela was fine. She didn’t faint. She wanted the afternoon off and fell over, which is exactly what six of my classmates promptly did, including two boys. They didn’t get the jag.

Down South they seem to regard the word ‘jag’ as low slang, used in error by uneducated ruffians here in the North.

Nonsense, I say. ‘Jag’ is correct. After all, the Scots invented medicine, so what we say goes.

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