Hard News: Public Address Word of the Year 2017
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I agree with the comments above that the term has been much overblown. I suggest instead that the political discourse has been hijacked by Jacindamaniamania.
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PostNeoliberal
Inspired by Brian Eston and the mazing exhibition by Simon Denny on at at Michael Lett Gallery.
There was a fascinating reaction to this at the IRL , not least the hosts, who viewed it as a term of abuse. I suppose polite people would say PostLibertarian. Not as much fun I think.
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PostNeoliberal
Inspired by Brian Eston and the mazing exhibition by Simon Denny on at at Michael Lett Gallery.
There was a fascinating reaction to this at the IRL , not least the hosts, who viewed it as a term of abuse. I suppose polite people would say PostLibertarian. Not as much fun I think.
There's definitely an unavoidable whiff of "post-something", regardless of what it's called.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
Given the neologism is such a blatant derivative of a globally recognised precedent
Damn there goes Jacindagate!
;- )In the beginning was the Word
I note ‘Phrase of the Year’ has crept into the ‘Word of the Year’ finalists…
Surely this is beyond the pale?
Only the unitary purity of a single word should contest – portmanteau and compound words (like ’Schweinefleischetikettierungsüberwachung-saufgabenübertragungsgesetz’* – but in English, natch!)
should be the limit – it’s lexically logical.
or does it change to WaPotY?* “legislative law for the monitoring of pork-meat labelling.”
(and hyphenated above as it extends into invisibility otherwise) -
mark taslov, in reply to
Damn there goes Jacindagate!
Contrarily…again one might point out the precedent there. A recent WaPo article drawing on research published in May, explored this trend:
When their male colleagues were introduced at conferences, they were usually called “Doctor.” But the men introduced them and other female doctors by their first names.
Looking back over previous -gate iterations, one notices that although few incorporate peoples’ names, male-gates tend more to taking the surname e.g.Sachsgate, Petrikgate, Lochtegate, Moggigate, Rathergate, Dasukigate, Erdogate, Khangate, Weinergate, whereas female-gates favour first names e.g. Gloriagate, Betsygate, Camillagate, Irisgate, Gulargate, Penelopegate. As expected there are exceptions to this such as Muldergate, Lleytgate, sometimes for obvious reasons as was the case with Billygate. One notable outlier is Choi Soon-sil gate which incorporated her full name.
That’s enough to work with.
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linger, in reply to
Choosing personal name reference for females vs. family name reference for males is partly a direct signal of gender power difference. But it’s more complicated than that, and not just a biased conscious choice of name. Part of it can be explained by gender bias in the reasons for achieving fame before involvement in a scandal (essentially, power vs attractiveness), and in the ease of achieving fame (so there are more famous men than famous women competing for namespace), and in the patriarchal family name convention in English (making personal names systematically more ambiguous for male referents and family names systematically more ambiguous for female referents). Of course, those biases show the same social dynamic at work.
Though tbh there really was no other viable name for Weinergate, eh.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
That’s enough to work with.
Taranakigate?
...it's an open and shut case. -
So Jacindamania wins WotY - and it is a word - 'a single distinct meaningful element of speech or writing' ....
But the two runner-ups are phrases - 'a small group of words standing together as a conceptual unit'.
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Sacha, in reply to
pendant.
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Ian Dalziel, in reply to
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In 2010, of course, Public Address readers bypassed the news and opted for a neologism – the great ungendered insult that was “twatcock”.
So yeah, as I highlighted earlier last year after holding my tongue on the issue for a very.long.time, this is a dyadist neologism. It is, as you say, ungendered, but beyond contemporary cissexist narratives: all genitals are ungendered. It is however not unsexed. It is intersexed, it unequivocally describes the genital configuration of people like Sophia Young who was, as the article states, bullied mercilessly. This genital configuration – which affects anywhere between 1-500 to 1-80,000 human beings – was fashioned specifically as an insult, as a slur as it were.
Coercive and abusive normalisation of intersex people’s genitals is a particularly brutal manifestation of the gender binary and it is this mutilation (instigated here by the Europeans) which helps to erase the reality of intersex people – the reality of this type of genital configuration here being similarly erased by this slur which we’ve collectively coined.
This occurs in the same way that many abnormalities, disorders etc are fashioned as insults and latterly collated in ableist language lists.
which I’m afraid, isn’t great, but is something we’re familiar with. A reference.
ETA:
This type of genital obsession is likewise evident with the discussion and enthusiasm for pussy hats in my top link – doesn’t make it right.http://www.nationalreview.com/article/455377/pussyhats-racist-transphobic-feminists-say
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