This week the prime minister succeeded in calling a general election, and members of what his own cabinet had been calling “the zombie parliament” prepared to shamble off to their constituencies. The origin of the word “zombie” is west African (“compare Kongo ‘nzambi’ god, ‘zumbi’ fetish,” advises the OED), and its use to mean a walking corpse is thought by some to be related to the experiences of west African slaves transported to work on plantations in Haiti.

Yet zombies are not always bad. The American pianist Mary Lou Williams once recalled how she and her friends admiringly christened Thelonious Monk’s playing “zombie music”, because “the screwy chords reminded us of music from Frankenstein or any horror film”. And the cocktail known as a zombie (since the early 1940s) presumably induces in the drinker a pleasant state of thorough irresponsibility.

Just as zombies in films cannot work complicated machinery, so the “zombie parliament” proved incapable of passing legislation. But given “zombie” has, since the 1930s, also meant a slow-witted idiot, there is no guarantee that the next lot won’t be equally deserving of the name.

• Steven Poole’s A Word for Every Day of the Year is published by Quercus.