Oxford Dictionaries has named “post-truth” as its international word of the year, vanquishing a politically charged field that included “adulting,” “alt-right,” “Brexiteer,” “glass cliff” and “woke”.
The use of “post-truth” — defined as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” — increased by 2,000 per cent over the last year, according to analysis of the Oxford English Corpus, which collects roughly 150 million words of spoken and written English from various sources each month. Katherine Connor Martin, the head of U.S. dictionaries at Oxford University Press, said it surged most sharply in June after the Brexit vote and Donald Trump’s securing the Republican nomination for president, making it an unusually global word.
“What we found especially interesting is that it encapsulated a trans-Atlantic phenomenon,” she said. “Often, when looking at words, you’ll find one that’s a really big deal in the U.K. but not in the U.S.”
The term, whose first known usage in this particular sense was in a 1992 essay in The Nation magazine citing the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, does not represent an entirely new concept. But it does, Ms. Martin said, reflect a step past “truthiness,” the Stephen Colbert coinage that Merriam-Webster and the American Dialect Society each chose as its word of the year a decade ago.
“Truthiness is a humorous way of discussing a quality of specific claims,” she said. “Post-truth is an adjective that is describing a much bigger thing. It’s saying that the truth is being regarded as mostly irrelevant.”
Oxford’s word of the year is chosen to reflect “the ethos, mood or preoccupations” of a given year, but also to highlight the fact that English is always changing. Last year’s winner wasn’t a word at all, but the “Face With Tears of Joy” emoji. (Sigh. That was then.) In 2014, the laurel went to “vape.”
Some of the items on this year’s shortlist may prove ephemeral, like “coulrophobia” — extreme or irrational fear of clowns — which surged after a rash of reports of scary clowns.
“That belongs to a really interesting class of words, labelled ‘rare’ in the dictionary, that are usually only trotted out when people want to say, “There’s a word for that,” Ms. Martin said.
Others, like “alt-right,” seem likely to have more staying power, though that term has come under semantic attack from some on the left. In recent days, those critics have stepped up arguments that it as an overly cute euphemism for white supremacy. — New York Times News Service
