Tuesday, November 15, 2016

word of the year: "post-truth"

In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year.
Defined by the dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000% in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”.
Talk about "newspeak."
Newspeak is explained in chapters 4 and 5 of [George Orwell's] Nineteen Eighty-Four, and in an appendix to the book. The language follows, for the most part, the same grammatical rules as English, but has a much more limiting, and constantly shifting, vocabulary. Any synonyms or antonyms, along with undesirable concepts, are eradicated.
Roll over George Orwell!

2 comments:

  1. Come on, the upcoming new President has ancestries from Germany not Britain. Waddyaexpect :)

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  2. I believe the british monarchy hails from germany as well.

    ReplyDelete