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A four-letter word has crept into the vernacular in recent months, and it's high time we declared war on it.

It's not the F-bomb and certainly not the C-bomb. But it's just as vulgar. It's the D-bomb.

A little more than six months into Trump's second presidency, and the word "deal" is being tossed around like confetti - by newsreaders, politicians, commentators, and ordinary people in the street.

Call me old-fashioned, but not that long ago, we talked of peace agreements and treaties. The Japanese surrender on the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, wasn't a deal. It was the signing of the Articles of Surrender. The 1952 Treaty of San Francisco, which established friendly relations between Japan and the United States, wasn't a deal either. It was a treaty.

We know from his background in real estate that the US president is pathologically transactional, his worldview fashioned by "deals" over everything from land to hotels to steaks to sneakers to mobile phones to dodgy cryptocurrency to licensing the use of his name.

We also know Trump's grasp of English is so patchy he had to hire a ghostwriter to author his book The Art of the Deal, and that his posts on social media defy linguistic convention - and, too often, comprehension.

But that doesn't mean we have to step onto the same slippery slope and debase our language by referring to every negotiation as "an attempt to strike a deal".

I've watched with alarm the intrusion of this Trumpism into everyday reporting on trade, Gaza and the war in Ukraine. We now have trade deals, where not that long ago we had trade agreements.

The Washington Accord signed between........

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