21 Nov /16

Post-truth – Word of the year

Post-truth – Word of the year - EVS Translations
Post-truth – Word of the year – EVS Translations

After the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji, was declared as Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year for 2015, said to best represent the moods and preoccupations of the last year, this year is not to disappoint again.

The Oxford English Dictionary named ‘post-truth’ its 2016 International Word of the Year. It is actually an adjective and OED defines it as: ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.’

The defining term of the current year has been around for some decades, but noted a nearly 2,000 percent increase in its usage over the past months, mainly in the context of the UK Brexit Referendum and the US Presidential Election.

And it were exactly the above-mentioned events to highlight two other words, that found place among the shortlisted finalists this year. The UK Referendum coined the word Brexiteer – a person in favour of Brexit; and the US Presidential Election voted out alt-right – a shortening of ‘alternative right,’ a group of people with far right ideologies who reject mainstream politics and rely strongly on online media.

Going back to our word of 2016, for starters, it is already a rare phenomenon to see a term trending at the same time at both sides of the Atlantic, and adding that it is overwhelmingly associated with politics, we must come to acknowledge its global impact, even though the acknowledgement urges facing the reality that modern people are willing to accept that the truth might be irrelevant.

The term, itself, started its existence in the 90s with the general meaning of ‘after the truth was known’, to be firstly recorded in its currently proclaimed meaning, denoting the limited influence of facts, in a 1992 essay by the Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine, on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War.

And the term post-truth politics was coined on 1st April 2010, by the blogger David Roberts in a post for Grist, where he defines it as: “a political culture in which politics (public opinion and media narratives) have become almost entirely disconnected from policy (the substance of legislation)”.

Most experts blame social media, and its growing role in distributing information and opinions that influence the masses, for the boom of post-truth politics, of political campaigns focusing on voters’ emotions rather than objective facts.

Yet, the blames do not decrease the impact of this month’s The Independent tweet: “We’ve entered a post-truth world and there’s no going back.”