Sunday, March 14, 2010

Newspeak lexicon

At The Peoples' Cube: Neologisms (For inclusion into 2100 Biden-Webster Dictionary).

A taste:

  • Condecession: set-asides or subsidies to groups one feels sorry for.
  • Defaulty setting: Something incorrect that's widely believed because it was the first explanation proposed rather than because there was any actual evidence or proof.
  • Dimprovement: A bad, dimwitted improvement that isn't better, often worse. (Can you say New Coke, Vista operating system or nationalized health care?)
  • Feelosophy: positions and policies adopted because they make you feel good or virtuous rather than on any reasoned basis or because they could possibly work.
  • Iconoklatch: group of nonconformists who uniformly conform to an "alternative" set of standards.
  • Infopinion: The intermingling of news and opinion so that it's hard to tell which is what. Often called analysis.
  • Literateur: Someone who talks about and refers to books they've never actually read. Think Wealth of Nations or Das Kapital.
  • Malapropitization: Needlessly adding prefixes and suffixes to words to make yourself sound erudite, more scholarlisticalful.
  • Nincomproof: A line of thinking both logical yet so unreasonable only an idiot or an intellectual would buy it.
  • Oprahtunity: The chance to cash in on fame in one area in another area you really have no qualification for. (Al Gore for instance.)
  • Psychophant: A lunatic follower of a lunatic leader. (See Marxist-Leninist)
There are more.

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