Used-car salesman not salesman

Swiss Toni, a used-car salesman and well-known character in British comic satire.

Will everybody stop calling the prime minister a salesman? For a start, in British English it’s not an insult but a job description. And more crucially, he’s not a very good one, because anybody can close a deal in negotiations where you let the other person hold all the cards and get everything he wants, while the country gets shafted and your friends get a cut.

I don’t see any good negotiation going on with Hani Hasan Naji Al Salah. I see a sharp desert trader who comes from a culture where baksheesh is normal and where people’s rights and views are not respected, wiping his feet on a star-struck man from the sticks with dollar signs for cartoon pupils.

I don’t know why ‘salesman’ is considered a pejorative term in Malta.

In British English, the pejorative term is not ‘salesman’ but ‘used-car salesman’, which is completely different, implying as it does a sleazy approach to palming off a cut-and-shut, or a highly polished car with a bad engine, on an unsuspecting customer.

It’s not the salesman aspect which is negative, but the implied willingness to cheat a customer or sweet-talk him into buying a bad deal.

In Malta alone, many thousands of people make their living by selling things and it’s a decent, honest, necessary occupation which they do well.

I work with salesmen (and women) routinely, and I have yet to meet one who is remotely like Muscat.

It’s even worse when politicians of the Opposition sneer that Muscat is a salesman. No, he isn’t. At best, he’s a barrow-boy. And when they do that, they forget about all the salesmen and saleswomen who vote Nationalist and shouldn’t be insulted by default in this manner.

So stop it with the salesman.