My absolute favourite thing this week is Ruth Davidson’s decision to resort to Shakespearian insults to deal with Donald Trump’s outrageous suggestion that America should ban Muslims from entering the country.

Her brilliant barb from the Bard – “Trump's a clay-brained guts, knotty-pated fool, whoreson obscene greasy tallow-catch, right?” – sparked a fair amount of debate on Twitter, with a predictable split between those who thought it most unbecoming for a party leader to start slinging Shakespearian snubs about the place and those (like me) who thought it was hilarious.

How great would it be if we were to ditch nasty, modern swear-words in favour of much more poetic put-downs?

Who wouldn’t rather be called a ‘mouldy rogue’ or a ‘base, proud, shallow, beggarly, three-suited, hundred-pound, filthy, worsted-stocking knave’ than simply compared to a part of or all of the reproductive organs?

In truth, Shakespeare was a master at biting back-chat. The man clearly loved a good insult.

Some of my favourites include the feisty “You scullion! You rampallian! You fustilarian! I’ll tickle your catastrophe!” from Henry IV Part 2; the delightfully disparaging ““There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune” from Henry IV Part One, (which, indicentally, is where Ruth Davidson’s quote is from too) and the brutal, but effective “more of your conversation would infect my brain” from Coriolanus.

I’ve been helping out at my seven-year-old’s after-school book club and recently, the subject of Shakespeare came up. Most of them knew who he was, a few could name some of the plays he had written but none of them realised they quoted him several times a day without even thinking.

We all do, in fact – ever said your kids have ‘eaten you out of house and home’? Or that you ‘didn’t sleep a wink’ last night? Or that you were ‘in stitches’ over something funny? All of those phrases were invented by or recorded for the first time in writing by William Shakespeare, and they remain in common usage today.

Like him or loathe him, Shakespeare influenced language and still does, almost 400 years after his death.

He enriched and entertained, and his writing never gets stale.

And if you don’t agree, then thou art all a bunch of lily-liver’d, foolish rascally knaves.