Scottish football remains poisoned by the continuing fall-out over the liquidation of Rangers last year. Bitterness and venom are spouting forth in ways the game has scarcely known north of the border.

A section of Rangers supporters feel deeply aggrieved, and much of it is justified. Their club was betrayed and ruined by a rogues' gallery of dodgy geezers, and terrible damage was done.

The problem is, many of these same supporters originally gave their backing to some of these characters. I was outside Ibrox on May 7 2011 when Craig Whyte rode into town. If some Rangers fans that day had waved palm branches along Edmiston Drive they couldn't have looked more exuberant in their welcome.

Egged on by the Daily Record, which repeatedly fawned to Whyte and fatuously hailed him "a billionaire", a seed was being sown which would have catastrophic consequences.

When liquidation finally came to Rangers, an eruption of bitterness and casting around for blame broke out, and it continues to this day. Just ask Jim Spence, a BBC Scotland journalist, who has recently copped much flak.

Spence's "crime" was an odd one. On Radio Scotland last week he blithely spoke words on air which a wide range of Scottish football observers, businessmen, insolvency people and more would have taken for granted. Spence referred to the liquidated Rangers Football Club plc as "the club that died".

Amid this furnace of ill-feeling, for many Rangers supporters this is a detested and deeply hurtful phrase. And it fairly roused them to action. Over 400 Rangers fans complained to BBC Scotland, who duly issued an apology for any offence that may have been taken.

Rangers and their director of communication, James Traynor, leapt into action by issuing their own statement, appearing to warn that the club's lawyers might get involved over a journalist such as Spence daring to use such words as "a dead club".

Traynor should certainly know all about that. Last year, still working as a Daily Record columnist, this is what he himself wrote: "Rangers as we know them died. Rangers FC are dead."

If, as Jim and Rangers are threatening, their lawyers go to war over Spence, it would surely count as the most farcical piece of litigation ever seen in Scottish football. For the sake of Rangers' own head of communication, one must hope the legal pursuit is not retrospective.

The context of Spence and the BBC will have to be worked out separately. In recent months, the BBC Trust set out guidelines for referring to "old" and "new" Rangers, and held that the BBC in Scotland had failed to be precise in this.

But a wider point is more intriguing: are journalists, reporters and commentators really to be hounded for referring to the liquidated Rangers as "the old Rangers"?

There has been something sinister about the way Jim Spence has been treated, given that many would argue he merely stated the bleedin' obvious.

Perhaps Spence and Traynor, in their separate ways, were trying to be controversial or provocative in their remarks. In which case, controversy can have its place, just as it must also be counter-challenged, such as here.

Where the exegetical fog exists is when, in debating the sins of the old Rangers regime, people seek to distinguish between the club then and now.

It inevitably needs a phrase such as "old" or "oldco" or "original" Rangers or some such delineation. The very language, though, makes some Rangers fans livid.

It is proving a painful subject. Some have argued that it shouldn't matter; that even for ardent Rangers supporters, the club is here, it plays at Ibrox, it has the same name, the same strip, the same lustre. Why, it has been asked, make such a song and dance?

But I've discovered this won't wash. For some Rangers fans it is an emotional agony to think of their precious club being dissolved last year - the notion is simply not for consideration.

The famed phrase "it was the company, not the club, which went bust" was born roundabout the spring of 2012, when liquidation became a certainty, and has been clung to ever since by fans. And hell mend anyone - and certainly any pesky hack - who dares to differ.

This has been a very painful experience for Rangers. And the venom and anger are showing no signs of abating.