THE last setpiece in the American Presidential election was played out in Las Vegas in the early hours of yesterday morning, with much made of the body language and the lack of a handshake.

I was just as interested in the real language being used and twisted. For example, there was a wonderfully childish exchange about who was Vladimir Putin’s puppet. This arises from Donald Trump’s egotistic belief that the Russian president called him “brilliant and talented”.

The Russian word that Mr Putin used in a 2015 interview was “yarkii” which means “bright”. That Mr Trump regarded as a compliment about his brilliant brainpower.

However, in Russian “bright” has no connotations of cleverness. As Mr Putin was careful to point out in June, it means “vivid” or “colourful”. Just like in English, saying someone is a “colourful character” is not the same as giving them a ringing endorsement for being “brilliant”.

The headlines were also grabbed by Mr Trump’s apparent refusal to accept the result of the election, although he is unlikely to complain much if he wins.

He complains that the election is “rigged”, pointing to independent research that said that 24m voter registrations – one in eight of the electorate – were either no longer valid or out-of-date, including 1.8m voters who were dead. But the researchers, a charity called Pew, said there was no indication that the dead were voting, but there was a need for databases to be updated.

It is an interesting word “rig”, with many meanings. The oldest is that it comes from “ridge” and it refers to the spine on the back of an animal, particularly a sheep. That’s why Riggwelter beer is brewed by Black Sheep in Masham – a “welter” is “a state of confusion or upheaval”, and so the bottles show a sheep lying on its back in a merrily confused state.

Rig has another agricultural meaning: it is a raised strip of ploughed land between two furrows. That’s why in Darlington there is a street called Four Riggs – there was a field with room for four ploughed ridges.

The Oxford English Dictionary doesn’t explain how the word “rig” came to mean “dishonestly fixed”, as Mr Trump is using it, but the word does, of course, have a nautical meaning. “To rig” a ship is to prepare it to sail with all the necessary ropes, chains, sails and supplies. So “to rig” an election must mean to prepare it for the right result with all the necessary votes cast ahead of polling day.

As Mr Putin said, Mr Trump certainly adds colour with his unfounded allegations of a rigged election, but I hope that Hillary Clinton can take the wind out of his sails.

I GAVE a short address to the Year 10 assembly at Darlington’s Longfield School on Wednesday about the value of work experience, and began by asking for a show of hands to reveal if these 14- and 15-year-olds knew where they were going.

Less than a half said they didn’t have a clue what they wanted to do after school; one quarter said they probably knew what they wanted to do and another quarter said they were certain what they wanted to do.

I drilled down a little further, and asked two of the more confident-looking boys what careers they had set their hearts on, expecting to learn that train-driving had been replaced by footballing or computer games programming.

But the first chap replied that he wanted to be a “paediatric oncologist” and the second said he wanted to be an “astrophysicist”.

All I, a humble journalist, could say was “good luck” and applaud their brilliant ambition.