AS is often the case with pronouncements from the Great Panjandrums of the Orange Order, it was difficult to detect much in the way of nuance and subtlety in a recent intervention from the Rev Mervyn Gibson.
"The people are angry," he said. He went on to deploy the Twaddell Variation - "the people are very angry" - and, for a declamatory flourish, the Ligoniel Gambit: "The people are immensely angry."
It is not entirely clear who these angry/very angry/immensely angry people are, nor why Mr Gibson and other senior Orange Order figures feel obliged to refer to them with such proprietorial zeal.
It is an interesting question. Are they random people in the street? Orange Order members in Belfast? Orange Order members in Fermanagh? Loyalist paramilitaries? Tourists seeking the fabled land of Orangefest, like latter-day treasure hunters searching for King Solomon's mines?
Could they be people who go on holiday to avoid the Twelfth 'festivities'? People who couldn't get a ticket to be in The Nolan Show audience?
Might they be the members of the Game of Thrones cast and crew yet to complete the Northern Ireland Tourist Board-approved induction programme? Or the legions of people, Protestant and Catholic, nationalist and unionist, cheesed off at the antics of the Orange Order?
Orange Order types are fond of making such sweeping statements, not least because they think their ambiguity provides them with some cover when "the people" riot, throw bricks at DUP MPs, attack the police and urinate outside Catholic places of worship. You know the sort of thing.
The same shrug-of-the-shoulders logic applies to the tut-tutting criticisms that follow the annual excesses of the kick-the-Pope bands.
That's because bands, as we all know, are nothing to do with the Orange Order... "Yeah, right," as my six-year-old son might say when told that the Clangers really do live in space and eat Blue String Pudding and Green Soup.
Even he could identify the essential dishonesty at the heart of the Orange Order's rhetoric, its Grand Old Duke of York leadership that cranks up the anger to very immense levels and then pretends it is blameless for the ensuing mayhem.
The same air of warning/threat (delete as applicable) was also there in Mr Gibson's suggestion that the Order would this year not "help to police" flashpoint areas.
On this particular occasion, Mr Gibson was speaking after a meeting last week with secretary of state Theresa Villiers.
This was one of those regular but ultimately futile sessions in which the Order, before the marching season launches into its full-throated Ride of the Valkyries, gets to ventilate about a range of issues such as the ills of the Parades Commission and the inhumanity being meted upon the brethren in the caravan at Twaddell, who have now been camped out for more than 700 nights.
Twaddell might be a cause célèbre but it tells you something about the state of the Orange Order and its own internal difficulties that it is the best it can muster as a focus for protest.
Whatever Twaddell is, it is clear that it is not another Drumcree. If Drumcree was Tom Jones on a record-breaking run in Las Vegas then the Twaddell protest is more akin to Sir James Galway on a one-night-only gig in Crumlin Road Gaol; it is not as if bus-loads of stern-faced Orangemen are turning up from Tyrone and Derry to lend their support, a hint that not everyone in the institution follows the die cast by the leadership in Belfast.
And it is not only rural lodges who wonder what on earth is going on in Belfast.
Political unionism seems also to have allowed Twaddell to drop down its list of priorities, which may or may not be connected to the general election having been and gone, and Nigel 'the mighty' Dodds safely returned to Westminster.
Why, you could even be forgiven for forgetting all about the unionist 'graduated response' which was in the air this time last year. It was hardly 'Ulster Says No', was it?
No doubt the usual suspects will rediscover their voices as the Twelfth draws closer but we can likely expect deafening silence from the Protestant Churches.
The Churches seem to have no idea how they should deal with the Orange Order, not least because they are heavily infiltrated by - or is it the other way round? - clergy who also hold office in the institution. The Rev Mervyn Gibson is a Presbyterian minister.
Cowardice goes some way to explaining why Church leaders are reluctant to publicly challenge the worst excesses of the marching season and the Orange Order's role.
The Order might wear ostensibly Christian clothes, but these are more than threadbare in many places, to the dismay of those who wear their Christianity first and their Orangeism second.
In terms that Protestants ought to understand, the Orange Order has too often allowed itself to become a 'Gospel-plus' organisation, a cultural novelty which bolts a set of traditions and beliefs on top of the Biblical Gospel it apparently sets out to proclaim.
It's enough to make you angry.
