ABSTRACT
Francis Bacon is often regarded as the father of modern scientific method, and among his aphorisms is the warning about the idols of the marketplace. He recognised that the words and terms we use shape the way we think and reflect our beliefs, often not based on any reality or knowledge. Raymond Williams (1976) put this in modern idiom when he drew up a long list of ‘key words’. These tell us a lot about the era in which we live, and the dominant ideology of the time.
