Whygive a shock jock oxygen?

Talking about Willett’s assured final round, played against the backdrop of an implosion by overnight leader Jordan Spieth, Richardson said: ‘‘You’re leading the Masters – how’re you going to handle this, you Pommy git? Right, so pretty well then, old chap I see.’’

Keith Wallace’s complaint called Richardson’s choice of words ’’openly racist and derogatory’’. It’s hard to take that particularly seriously, because it’s the kind of language that’s often bantered around in the Antipodes, without any serious intent to offend. Australia-England cricket games in Australia have often featured banners with humorous messages like ‘‘If the Poms are batting, let’s tell the taxi to wait’’.

Interestingly, although various dictionaries refer to the terms Pom and Pommy as derogatory, a ruling by the Australian equivalent of the BSA in 2006 failed to uphold complaints about advertisements poking fun at ‘Poms’. A report in Aussie newspaper the Sunday Telegraph at the time said the Advertising Standards Board ’’unanimously dismissed the complaint after deciding ‘Pom’ was part of the Australian vernacular and largely used in playful or affectionate terms’’.

Plainly the term and its variations are not, as one English complainant to a Fairfax newspaper claimed several years ago, on a par with a certain racial epithet beginning with the letter N. The latter term, in the words of one online dictionary, ‘‘is now probably the most offensive word in English’’. While Pom and its variations might be perceived as derogatory by many English people, they contain none of the racial contempt of ‘‘that’’ word.

Of course, the more pertinent question here is probably ‘‘why give a self-styled TV shock jock like Mark Richardson the satisfaction of reinforcing his already over-exposed brand?’’

Comments like the Willett one, which was grudgingly tempered by his acknowledgement of the Englishman’s fine victory in the following sentence, are his stock in trade, and in line with the show’s brief. Just like ‘‘you loser!’’, or another smugly exaggerated reference to his apparently peerless test cricket career. One imagines this complaint will simply have fanned the flame of his braggadocio.

We should just learn to ignore him. He’ll hate that.