This is how today’s BBC News summed up (fairly accurately) the two main themes of last night’s Question Time special with Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn:

May managed to largely get away with her party’s abysmal track record of brutal cuts and austerity, while Corbyn was made very uncomfortable by a howling mob of angry, terrifyingly bloodthirsty old white men over Labour’s policy on Trident.

And while Corbyn’s position on the nuclear deterrent is idiotic and makes him an easy target for opponents, the main reason for the differing outcomes is language.

Spending £200bn on renewing Trident while completely undermining its only function – terrorising your enemies into peace with the thought of mutually assured destruction – by refusing to say that you’d use it even in retaliation is the worst of all possible worlds. Either save the money (the sensible option from every perspective), or simply and firmly say “We would never strike first but we would absolutely strike back”.

That preserves morality while defusing the issue politically, and it doesn’t matter a jot whether it’s true or not – as the Russian missiles plummet towards UK cities, if you don’t press the button because you don’t see the point in the useless vengeful murder of millions of civilians, it’s too late for it to damage your electoral prospects and you can die with a clear conscience.

So we know Corbyn is an idiot, because he wobbled and waffled and avoided a simple answer that would have moved the debate on, and as a result was battered again and again by the question. But how did May get away with swerving the main attack on her with a line that’s no less stupid?

Because every single remotely-alert adult human in the country knows that there IS a “magic money tree”. Between 2009 and 2012 both Labour and Tory UK governments simply conjured hundreds of billions of pounds out of thin air by a process that used to be bluntly called “printing money” but now goes under the name “quantitative easing”.

The “magic money tree” line is being pushed non-stop by the Tories now because it’s punchy and simple and ‘truthy”. It sounds rational because normal people think of government finances like household finances, and the rest of us can’t just churn out a load of crisp new £20s on our printer if cash gets a bit short.

But government finances DON’T work like household ones. Governments CAN just print money, with little in the way of consequences. Almost half a TRILLION pounds of extra cash floating around the economy from QE had almost no significant effect on inflation, and the only people who really suffered were people with savings in the bank, for whom interest rates fell to almost zero.

So why isn’t QE fired straight back at the Tories as an answer to “the magic money tree”? Because it’s been turned into difficult language.

As with so much about modern politics, the explanation can be found in “1984”.

What’s been done with Quantitative Easing, of course, is the exact reverse of that. Tories and bankers want people NOT to understand that QE is simply creating money out of nowhere, so they give it a name that’s awkward to physically say – it’s got too many syllables, and too many Ts close together – and has no intrinsic meaning.

(The phrase “quantitative easing” says absolutely nothing when isolated from context. What is being eased? How do you ease a quantity?)

The listener instinctively recoils from the very words, and is thereby distracted from the straightforward, easily-understood reality of “printing money”. From that position, it’s almost impossible to get a hearing for your explanation, which may be the reason Corbyn and the left in general barely even try.

It’s the simplest trick in the propaganda book, and it has shaped the entire nature of political discourse in the UK for a decade.

Money is a completely artificial construct. It’s a thing humanity has arbitrarily imposed on itself. It’s not a planetary resource that can run out or be destroyed, like metals or oil or oxygen or arable land. We create and withhold it at will, and it could be used just as easily to pay nurses as it was to bail out the banks.

Not doing so is an ideological choice, not an arithmetical one. And people instinctively understand that, so it’s vital for politicians to obscure it under offputting jargon.

“Strong and stable goverment” is now a line that provokes mocking laughter rather than confidence, and Theresa May can’t paint herself as a fearless Brexit negotiator when she’s too scared to even show up to a debate. So the Tories are falling back to their traditional last resort – economic responsibility.

And even that’s a tough sell, given that the reality is that Tory governments borrow more money than Labour ones. So the only way to make it stick is by turning voters off from the debate before they look too closely at the facts.

Words are powerful, readers. “Quantitative Easing” is a brick wall made of them, and it’s big enough to hide a whole forest of money trees behind.