The singer Nick Cave declared on his blog recently that “political correctness” had become “quite literally, bad religion run amuck”. This is just a fancier way of saying “it’s political correctness quite literally gone mad!” – but what exactly is “amuck”, or as British English usually has it, “amok”?

It derives from the Malay “amoq”, meaning vicious rage, via the Portuguese “amuco”, used by the writer Duarte Barbosa in a 1516 account of his travels in east Africa. According to the 1866 English translation, Barbosa heard of Javanese men who, if they became seriously ill, made a bargain with God, and once well again, would “take a dagger in their hands and go out into the streets and kill as many persons as they meet [...] in such wise that they go like mad dogs, killing until they are killed. These are called amuco.”

Perhaps Cave thus imagined a modern puritan in a frenzy of denouncing as many of those around him as possible before, inevitably, being cancelled in his turn? Or perhaps the singer is simply like the hero of Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Lothair, who was “ready to run a muck with anyone who crossed him”, and just enjoys the rhetorical fight.

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