The Devil’s Glossary of 2019 Newspeak
Ever wonder where that fashionable nonsense crazypeople preach all over the media and internet comes from? Where that bizarrely-Orwellian academic phrasing originated? Confused about internalized hegemonic patriarchy-centric-discourse over heterobinaries? Who came up with all this crap?
A lot of imposters trying to pass themselves off as academics. With too much time and government funding on their hands.
The difference between the sciences and the humanities is quite straightforward. When you come up with a theory or make a claim:
a) In science, you must prove it impartially and objectively.
b) In the humanities, you are free to proclaim it as “truth”, without proof.
What has been trotted out in journals for the last 50 years in the humanities has, in essence, been nothing more than opinion. That opinion, it seems, only wants to come to one single convenient conclusion — there is no truth, it’s all impossible to know, and it’s all subjective: but if the truth were not knowable, nothing would be intelligible, or able to even function.
It is astounding how many sources of information on the Internet have been deliberately “edited” to give the impression these “ideas” are older or more credible than they are.
As Chomsky said of Lacan in 2012:
“Quite frankly I thought he was a total charlatan. He was just posturing for the television cameras in the way many Paris intellectuals do. Why this is influential, I haven’t the slightest idea. I don’t see anything there that should be influential.”
In 1911, Ambrose Bierce published the “The Devil’s Dictionary”. His definition of “Conservative” is as apt today as it was 100 years ago:
Conservative (n.) A statesman who is enamoured of existing evils, as distinguished from the Liberal, who wishes to replace them with others.
It’s time for a revised version.
Everything in this “Glossary” is Bullshit
Don’t let a deliberately-edited definition or a reference fool you. Almost everything on this absurd list is absolute nonsense, yet it is promoted as “true” without the slightest of objective evidence — other than circular references to previous papers which are equally absurd. Nothing has changed since Sokal. In fact, it’s only got worse.
As Orwell noted so well in 1946:
“Political language… is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
Ableism (1981), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
The foolish belief disabled people are humourless, fragile creatures requiring your pity, who need yet another thing to worry about. Also, descriptions of activists derived from the observation their condition resembles a disability.
Inspired by psychopath Michel Foucault’s “challenging” ideas on mental illness merely being a “social label” (i.e. his), the term arose in the midst of feminist in-fighting. First mentioned in the May 1981 (Volume 11) edition of “Off Our Backs” magazine. Later formalised by Castañeda & Peters’ 2000 paper “Addressing Classism, Ableism, and Heterosexism in Counselor Education”.
Addiction (1951), Pharmacology (Sciences)
Pathological avoidance of responsibility and/or difficult feelings through the habitual use of chemicals which cause disruption of the brain’s natural functioning.
Before Freud’s catastrophic usage of cocaine, drunkards and opium-eaters were considered personally responsible for bad habits. The notion of it being a disease was not posited until 1956 by the AMA declaring alcoholism an illness, and is illustrated perfectly by the disagreement today among professionals between the term and “dependence”. Alcoholics Anonymous was founded in 1935 by Robert Smith and Bill Wilson, and the term was popularized from “habit” in 1951 by Arthur Grollman in Pharmacology and therapeutics.
ADHD (1963), Psychology (Humanities)
Boredom. The inability of advertising-soaked children to restrain their enormous levels of natural energy into a single position in a chair to listen to things they could not care less about.
In 1963, psychologist Keith Conners published a study on the effects of Ritalin (methylphenidate) in “emotionally disturbed children” and their impulsivity. After 50+ years of pharmaceutical profiteering, he publicly confessed he felt “the over-diagnosis of ADHD was “an epidemic of tragic proportions”. In 1971, R. A. Dykman et al published “Progress in Learning Disabilities”.
African American (1989), Political Rhetoric
Black.
Apparently traceable as far back as 1782 in a Philadelphia newspaper, the phrase was popularized by Jesse Jackson in 1989 at a meeting of 75 black groups. Doesn’t seem to include white South Africans or North African Arabs.
Antifascist (1932), Political Science
Morally pure vigilante superhero — ironically dressed as a masked fascist black bloc thug— ready to protect innocent ordinary people from difficult ideas with gang vandalism, sabotage, and violence.
The first to coin the term was Mussolini himself, who described his own secret police as an organisation which hunted down “anti-fascists”. Conventionally, the starting point of socialist and communist resistance to fascism in Europe is dated to the 1930s in the context of the establishment of the Third Reich in 1933 and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in 1936 (in which Orwell fought). The fragments of German socialist and communists parties who resisted the Nazis — 15,000 or so — allied from within housing estates and were called “Antifaschistische Ausschüsse,” “Antifaschistische Kommittees,” or the now famous “Antifaschistische Aktion” (“Antifa”).
Anxiety (1993), Psychiatry (Sciences)
Debilitating, unstoppable, and heartbreaking medical disability special people suffer from when facing the obstacle of needing to something everyone has to, which requires character.
Feeling anxious is normal; it is one of the 27 human emotions. When it is present at a pathological level, it can become a disorder. The idea children needed treatment without a diagnosis of a disorder is traceable back to articles in the Journal of Adolescent Psychiatry, such as “How can epidemiology improve mental health services for children and adolescents?” (Costello, Burns, Angold, & Leaf, 1993).
Assignment at Birth (2014), Psychology (Humanities)
The cruel, ignorant, and misguided actions of biological essentialists from 1811 observing which of the 2 human forms 99.994% of non-hermaphroditic infants developed as.
Despite it not being possible for neonatal children to have experienced any form of socialisation, whilst simultaneously displaying gender-specific traits (e.g, face/object attraction), the humanities began assuming medical scientists knew less than they did around 2014, citing “sexologist” and paedophile-apologist John Money’s theory of “Gender Neutrality at Birth” after the idea of “reassignment” surgery. Unfortunately, the only patients' Money worked with ended up dead or in serious trouble.
Authentic
Not being a fraud, imposter, charlatan, pseud, or pretentious social-climber.
Binary (1967), Literature
It’s fashionable to talk about them. It sounds intellectual™. They’re not supposed to exist and only humans created them in their foolish chimp-like minds to oppress others.
Although “fashionable” discussion started around 1953, the term resonates to Jacques Derrida — French philosopher, and disliker of the idea of an age of sexual consent for children. He was profound, despite not being able to understand Signs. With his dislike of Western “logocentrism” and his self-admitted “Marxist” concept of Deconstruction, his broader thesis was text could only be understood at all in the concept of competing opposites (which he also misunderstood from the original definition of a binary of being in the state of true or false). What a mind.
Bigot (late-60s), Political Rhetoric
Unperson who stubbornly refuses to accept behaviour should not be subject to morality, even after threats, mobbing, vilification, and the condemnation of intellectual™ professors.
Although it’s traditionally been with us for 400+ years as a French-pejorative term for overly-religious Normans who were obsessively tied to their beliefs, the contemporary meaning of the word as someone prejudiced against identity groups re-emerged in the 70s and 90s, in magazines such as Face.
Biological Essentialism (mid-90s), Sociology (Humanities)
Science. The “Nature” bit in Nature vs Nurture. The arch-enemy global supervillain trying to destroy the left’s Brave Movement to define everything you’ve ever heard of as something society, (whomever that is) just made up with words.
Darwin’s theses introduced the idea of populations and polymorphism, which updated the classical Greek theories of Forms. Since the 1930s, essentialism has been seen as outdated. Children can grasp it, professors can’t. Sociology’s sharpest slur in the fight to prove it’s all really nurture. The term emerged from nowhere, back from the grave, in the 90s.
Body/Fat Positivity (1969), Literature
Having a totally reasonable belief that no-one should dare shame you by finding you unattractive if you refuse to moderate your diet or exercise regularly.
Despite obesity becoming endemic in Western culture, the “body acceptance” movement can trace itself back to Lew Louderback’s 1967 essay “More People Should be Fat!” and the establishment of the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance (NAAFA) in 1969. Multiple “scholars” in 1983 claimed that fat hatred is formed or influenced by other forces of “oppression”, but popularization of the term is attributed to Kathleen LeBesco and her 2004 contribution to one of the world’s stupidest publication resumes “Revolting Bodies?: The Struggle to Redefine Fat Identity”.
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Born in the Wrong Body (1928), Psychology (Humanities)
Thinking like a girl when you’re a boy. Doing boy stuff if you’re a girl. Being upset about it because… society.
The concept of the mind and body being separate has been with us since Greek times as Mind-Body Dualism. It’s also the concept in philosophy of Soma (body) and Psyche (mind). The expression finds its modern routes in “sexologist” Richard von Krafft-Ebing’s theory of “Sexual Inversion” which was included on his large list of seriously disturbing sexual behaviour.
Centric (1990)
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for centered. Even more impressive if you add “icity” at the end.
Check Your Privilege (2007), Internet
An intellectual™-sounding insult used by rich white kids who want to look cool to their professor.
In 1998, arch-idiot Peggy McIntosh followed up her previous disaster with a sequel: “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack”. But this one had checklists. After word spread on WMST-L, feminist blogs all over the internet began parroting the trendy new checklist idea.
Children Are Socialised Into Gender (1981), Psychology (Humanities)
Girls only like dolls because, society.
The first attempt to definitely codify nurture-essentialism as a basis for social engineering was made by dating-failure and psychologist Sandra Bern in 1981 with her proposed Gender Schema Theory on sex-typing. Unfortunately, Bern based the entire thing on the memorisation of words and ignored the basic scientific fact that infants unexposed to social influence display gendered behaviour. Sad.
Cisgender (1995), Literature
The 99.999% of humans who experience no difference between their biology and what they think they are, i.e. have a sense of their gender from where the pee comes out and whether they have the thing which they put in, or the receiving bit where it goes in, when making a baby. Latin is legal and intellectual™.
Although supposedly first coined on the Usenet group alt.transgendered around 1995 by Dutch transgender person Carl Buijs (or Donna Lynn Matthews), or German sexologist Volkmar Sigusch in his research work, it was popularized through a 2007 book titled “Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity” by Julia Serano, who borrowed it from a 2002 post to WMST-L by legendary scholar Emi Koyama (bio: “multi-issue social justice activist and writer synthesizing feminist, Asian, survivor, dyke, queer, sex worker, intersex, genderqueer, and crip politics, as these factors”). Born a man, Serano somehow got a PhD while cross-dressing and worked at Berkeley for 17 years. But crucially, she is a slam poet.
Civil / Domestic Partnership (1968), Law
Having all the characteristics of being married, but not being married.
Unsurprisingly, it was the French who led the way in 1968 with article 515–81 of the Code Civil defining a domestic partnership or concubinage(“concubinage or concubinage notoire”) for straight or same-sex couples. In 1979, Californian gay rights activist Tom Broughamproposed it as a “new” idea in the US.
Climate Change (1956), Geochemistry (Sciences)
Apocalyptic teen drama episode caused by capitalism, where left-wing extremists save the world by forcing the world to finalize realise the promise of communism.
Canadian Physicist Gilbert Plass first documented the issue of carbon dioxide accumulating in Earth’s atmosphere due to human industrial activity and rapid population growth. His 1956 paper “The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change” preceded geochemist Wallace Broecker’s 1975 article in Science magazine titled “Climatic Change: Are We on the Brink of a Pronounced Global Warming?”. Modern usage exploded in 1985.
Code of Conduct (1991), Public Relations
Arbitrary rules intended to create and enforce a socially-engineered political orthodoxy within an organisation resembling professional ethics.
The hated scourge of the tech world, along with the endless ideological “statements” included on website footers and the so-called “contributor covenant”. Ethics are nothing new (nurses and psychologists were publishing codes of practice in the 50s), but the current social justice wrecking ball document style of defining “good behaviour” to replace actual law emerged in the late-eighties. In 1991, Levi Strauss adopted a “code” derived from the International Labour Organization and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In 1992, Nike followed, in order to repair its lost reputation for using child labour.
Community (1995), Sociology (Humanities)
Any group of two or more people, regardless of whether they display any traits which would define a community. Such as the “Latino stamp-collecting transgender pansexual facebook-boycotting community”.
The term has been most misused, obviously, by fashionable “thinkers” in Silicon Valley social media companies who like to combine Bernays’Freudian ideas with evolutionary biology into “brain hacking”. The rot started, however, with Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn’s 1995 consumer research article “Brand Community and the Sociology of Brands”.
Construct (1956), Psychology (Humanities)
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for made-up.
(Postmodern) Critical (Race) Theory (1937), Sociology (Humanities)
An attempt to apply Marxism to basically everything taught in a university.
First defined by sociologist Max Horkheimer at the Frankfurt School in his 1937 essay “Traditional and Critical Theory” as a modernist attempt to do for sociology against positivism what Marx had done against capitalism, but things took a turn for the worse when it just wasn’t cool enough for Foucault and his ilk to conform, which resulted in Boje, Fitzgibbons, and Steingard’s 1996 manifestos creating the Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization Science. By 1981, alternative law programs had spun off Critical Race Theory. Even in 1997, judges in the US were labelling “critical race theorists and postmodernists the ‘lunatic core’ of ‘radical legal egalitarianism”.
Critique (1781), Literature
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for criticism. Sounds a bit French, like Derrida, de Beauvoir, Lacan, and Foucault. Even better if you mention Kant.
Cuck (2014), Internet
Being weak, ineffectual, and effeminate by allowing yourself to be dominated.
“Cuckold” is a c.1250 medieval term for the husband of an unfaithful wife. During the Gamergate scandal over 2014 the boyfriend of Zoe Quinn was referred to with the shorthand before Steven Bannon and Breitbart popularized the term as a slur (“cuckservative”) by the alt-right.
Cultural Appropriation (1968), African American Studies (Humanities)
Misrepresenting the normal human behaviour of exchanging and celebrating cultural symbols and motifs as theft.
Derived from the Marxist idea of “class appropriation”, the popularization of this abjectly-absurd phrase comes from an entry by British painter Kenneth Coutts‐Smith in a 1976 book entitled “The Myth of Primitivism”, chapter “Some General Observations on the Concept of Cultural Colonialism”. Originally referred to in “Rebellion or Revolution?” (1968) by professor of African American Studies, Harold Cruse.
Deconstruction (1967), Literature
One French pervert’s attempt to bring Marxism into literature and convince the bottom 2% of students nothing can actually be true.
Deconstruction is a nicer word than its counterpart, destruction. Jacques Derrida — who was so, omg, profound — published “Of Grammatology” in 1967 with its “spirit of Marx” after a disastrous study of linguist Ferdinand de Saussure ‘s work on signifier/signified (Semiotics). His idea was simple: demonstrate language and meaning are separate (cough, gender) and always biased from subjectivity, i.e. ergo there is no objective truth which can be known. His intellectual diarrhoea proved quite useful for “scholars” who wanted to attack institutions and claim their critics' points’ could not be true. Derrida’s work has contributed virtually nothing workable to the human race. But he was so profound.
Dehumanising (1996), Law
Refusing to accept an absurd idea merely on the basis a human said it or believes it.
Law professor Gregory Stanton presented the “8 Stages of Genocide” to the US State Department in 1996 after his work on the Khmer Rouge’s horrific crimes in Cambodia and the Rwandan genocide. Stage 3 (“Dehumanisation”) describes the process in which the target group is referred to as rodents or insects on government-owned media. In 2012 it was updated to include “discrimination” and “persecution”: we all know where that’s going.
Democracy is an illusion (2000), Political Science
Voting is pointless. The world is controlled by an elite.
In 2000, Colin Couch published “Coping with Post-Democracy” for the Fabian Society. He describes it as a system which “continues to have and to use all the institutions of democracy, but in which they increasingly become a formal shell”.
Deny My Existence, Social Rhetoric
Absurdly non-seqitur appeal of a person who denies biological reality accusing a person who disagrees with them of denying “their” reality, in a way which implies it is akin to murder; even though they are alive and exist.
It’s impossible to say when the term first originated, but most contemporary theories associate it with transgenderism and the Glomar response often parrotted by military institutions.
Deplatform(ed) (1974), Political Rhetoric (Extremism)
The use of intimidation, sabotage, or violence to prevent a person from being heard by others. Always justified morally.
“No-Platform” was a form of “direct action” (“prior restraint”) devised in 1974 by the International Marxist Group (IMG) and International Socialists (IS) as an extreme tactic against the hard-right National Front’s recruitment activities on university campuses, and was formally adopted by the National Union of Students (NUS). It was so extreme, even the most left-wing newspapers denounced it.
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Dialectic (1751), Philosophy
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for a way of discerning the truth.
Direct Action (1912), Literature
Violence, sabotage, intimidation, rioting, and vandalism which sounds less like any of those and can be cited to sound intellectual™.
Extremists on both sides rarely describe their holy and righteous vigilante crusades in ways which are likely to lead to their arrest. Frequently attributed to female anarchist Voltairine de Cleyre from her same-titled essay in 1912, although more commonly associated with founding member of the British communist party William Mellor in his same-titled 1920 book, and/or MacDonald’s essay on Syndicalism.
Discourse (16th C), Theology
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for discussion.
Disinvite(d) (1940s), Political Rhetoric (Extremism)
Method of avoiding bad PR by pandering to vigilante demands, after receiving threats of public mobbing, vilification, and/or of future violence.
Asking a dinner guest not to come isn’t a new phenomenon. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) has catalogued over 200 “heckler’s vetoes” from 2000 to 2015, with a noticeable spike in the graph appearing around 2012. Speaker bans have been in place in California against communists since WWII.
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (2007), Political Activism
A clever way to fool a company into operating as a socialist government on the pretence of avoiding bad PR by being nice.
Few can define it, but everyone committed to it and it’s awesome. The opposite of diversity (we’re all different) is not homogeneity, but university (we’re one). When “wellness” fell out of fashion — because it was too costly — the next round of corporate programs appeared. Diversity meant more people with melanin (racism); equity meant the “gender pay gap” (feminism), and inclusion meant disabled people (“ableism”). Between 1998 and 2013, Merrill Lynch had paid half a billion dollars to settle discrimination lawsuits. Around 2007, the Diversity in Philanthropy Project (DPP) began a 3-year campaign start championing the Green Lining Insititute’s ideas on “racial and economic justice”.
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Dogpile (1921), Literature
An outraged mob of people on the internet who appear in numbers to prove the Appeal to Majority fallacy correct and protect helpless victims by making more.
Originally a term for pigs rioting, then a sports metaphor, then a search engine, the contemporary meaning internet commenters attackingsomeone guilty of wrongthink.
Domesticity Is a Prison For Women (1964), Literature
Women feel unfulfilled as housewives. Because, society.
The battle-cry of bathroom fiction for middle-class women everywhere was humanist Betty Friedan’s 1964 bestseller “The Feminine Mystique”, which claimed women led lives of misery because of the way “society” expected them to reach peak happiness as housewives and mothers. Betty said she was beaten, then that she wasn’t. Nobody knows. She was married with kids.
Dog Whistle (1988), Political Science (Humanities)
Secret Hitler signal — only given by people who are not left-wing — to assemble and bring on the apocalypse to fight Progress towards the utopia. You couldn’t hear it, but it was there.
Supposedly an analogy for an ultrasonic tone of which is heard by dogs (yet is inaudible to humans), Richard Morin, director of polling for The Washington Post, notes in 1988 an invisible and untestable polling term the “Dog Whistle Effect”: politicians using subjective “coded language” to appeal to voters which only politically-opposed journalists seem to be able to detect.
Emotional Support Animal (1968), Law
A legal way to take your pet to places like supermarkets and government offices without being asked to tie them up outside.
Originally designated the legitimate purpose of helping traumatised veterans as service/assistance animals, any fragile millennial who “gets anxiety” can now register their Instagram-friendly pooch as a medical “support” to avoid fees on planes and mean landlords. “Assistance animals” were first recognised under the US federal Fair Housing Act, then the Air Carrier Access Act (ACAA), on the basis it would be “discrimination” against someone with a “disability”. Back in academia around 2009, the stupidity was being advanced with papers like “Advocating Change within the ADA: The Struggle to Recognize Emotional-Support Animals as Service Animals”.
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Equity (1875), Political Science (Humanities)
A clever way to promote communism as a synonym for fairness and impartiality.
“Equity” means a share which is equally divided, as defined in jurisprudence. Although economically defined by shareholders in a company, in philosophical circles the phrase refers to Marx’s concept of ownership of the means of production by workers (i.e. through the division of labour and its inherent moral value) stated in his 1875 “Critique of the Gotha Program” citing “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs”.
Essentialism (1939), Philosophy
A word you can add to something which exists, in reality, which you don’t like to make it look really bad and discriminatory. It sounds intellectual™.
Essentialism has been around since Plato’s day. It means something is required and necessary for something to function (essence is prior to existence). Now a synonym for not being “progressive”.
Ethic(s)
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for morality, so they don’t appear religious.
Everything is About Power (1975), Philosophy
The diary of a gay psychopath, written from a BSDM dungeon. The king of intellectuals™ everywhere.
The idea power is the only thing in the world comes directly from the writings of French “philosopher” Michel Foucault, who is worshipped like a god by a whole generation of Womens’ Studies and Queer Studies’ “professors”. Beginning with “Madness and Civilisation” (1960), descending through “The Order of Things” (1966), “Discipline and Punish” (1975), down to “A History of Sexuality” (1976), Foucault’s insanity can be summed up with Chomsky’s observation “He struck me as completely amoral, I’d never met anyone who was so totally amoral”.
Experience (1998), Literature
Anything that happens between you and any company, ever. For example, having a “charlatanism experience” when reading books by pseuds.
The next bad idea by the useless cynics who came up with selling “solutions” instead of products (Hello, Microsoft!), has been experiential marketing. The phenom can be traced directly back to a 1998 dotcom-madness article by Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in the Harvard Business Review titled “The Experience Economy”. Next up? The “Attention Economy”.
Fascist (1915), Political Science
Generic right-wing conservative person pulled towards authoritarian behaviour out of desperation and frustration with left-wing idiocy.
The traditional enemy of left-wing extremists advocating communism after the Russian Revolution. Derived from fascismo (Italian) from fascio (“a bundle of sticks”) with its root in fasces (Latin). The Fascist Revolutionary Party was founded in 1915 by Italy’s youngest prime minister, Benito Mussolini. In 1921 it became the National Fascist Party, which used the ancient Roman symbol of a magistrate’s bundle of rods tied around an axe, symbolising the ability to order capital punishment upon demand. Mussolini won in 1924 and established a dictatorship. 8 years later in England Oswald Mosley founded the British Union of Fascists which became infamous during the 1936 Battle of Cable Street.
Fashionable Nonsense (1997), Literature (Sciences)
The term Alan Sokal gave to words in stupid glossaries like these which were coined by intellectual imposters.
The Sokal Affair was a prank by physicists during the Science Warsbetween actual scholars and people from the humanities. The book it prompted was named “Fashionable Nonsense: Postmodern Intellectuals’ Abuse of Science”.
Feminism (1792), Literature
A trendy “I like women” label your boyfriend should adopt because Beyonce made it cool in 2014. Formerly a type of man-hating left-wing extremism derided by academia, business, entertainment, and ordinary people.
Officially, — if you don’t count Bonobos or mud huts — feminism began in 1792 during the French Revolution, with Mary Wollstonecraft’s “A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”. In contemporary times, child molester Simone de Beauvoir’s “Second Sex” in 1949, and abuse-fabricator Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique” in 1963 are widely considered to signal the beginning of what we know now as the four waves of Blue Hair & Armpit Hair Freedom.
Framework
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for a collection of bad ideas.
Gatekeeping (1943), Psychology (Humanities)
The unfathomably selfish idea of not agreeing to anyone changing anything they want on a whim for their own reasons.
A new entrant to the gender/culture war, “gatekeeping” is apparently “deciding who does or does not have access or rights to a community or identity”. Derived from psychologist Kurt Lewin’s 1943 “Gatekeeping Theory”, on the mass media, which was detailed in the chapter “Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change” of “The Problem of Changing Food Habits: Report of the Committee on Food Habits 1941–1943”.
Gay Liberation (1969), Political Rhetoric (Extremism)
The original plan for everything you’re wondering the social origin of.
After the Stonewall Riots in New York in 1969, a militant wing of protestors formed the Gay Liberation Front to ally with Women’s Liberation — including Peter Tatchell — which spread to Montreal and London the next year. Although it only lasted until 1974, the same people kept campaigning under the banner of “OutRage!”. In 1971, the GLF published its manifesto, which is frankly insane, obviously authored by radical feminist extremists, and terrifying by any standard — it became the political blueprint of the next 40 years.
Gender Essentialism (1995), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
The idea of women being born female tending to make them act like women. A sinister conspiracy. Highly intellectual™.
Attributed to Derrida/Foucault-loving Australian Women’s Studies Dean Elizabeth Grosz in her 1995 scribble “Space, time and perversion: essays on the politics of bodies”. A stable genius at work. Competitive analyses suggest Angela Harris’ 1990 paper “Race and essentialism in feminist legal theory” in Stanford law review.
Gender-fluid (1994), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
Unwilling to be classified by science as one of the two forms of homo sapiens because that’s just something society says.
Generally attributed to transexual Scientologist Kate Bornstein in her 1994 paper “Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”. Also the subject of a 1993 Suede concert.
Gender Identity (1968), Psychiatry (Sciences)
The profound academic notion boys might be different from girls because they are boys or girls, and derive part of their identity from it.
A previously undiscussed idea promoted by Freud-loving psychiatrist Robert Stoller, from the Gender Identity Clinic at UCLA and author of a 1968 book ”Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity”, and John Money, whose patients didn’t do too well (see “Assignment at Birth”).
Gender Neutral (1963), Psychiatry (Sciences)
Not identifiable as one of the two forms of homo sapiens (reprise).
John Money yet again, 1963, in the Encyclopaedia of Mental Health.
Gender Pay Gap (1957), Political Rhetoric
Not being paid in absentia by your employer for making a new human, as you would in a communist system.
Comparing the lifetime income of males against females determines an equity (equality of outcome) calculation. In a communist system, both would be equal regardless of circumstances (not unsurprisingly favoured, given most feminist authors “identify as” Marxists). Although the US law of 1963 and UK law of 1970 (after the Dagenham/Ford protests) cemented the issue’s importance, the dreadful and politicised scholarship of median data currently hijacked by activists began when humanities “scholars” started “interpreting” core data such as Gary Becker’s 1957 book “The Economics of Discrimination” and Stanley/Jarrell’s 1998 “Gender wage discrimination bias? A metaregression analysis” (Journal of Human Resources).
Genderqueer (1995), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
Not classifiable by science as one of the two forms of homo sapiens.
Used by the founder of activist group GenderPAC, Riki Wilchins, in the newsletter In Your Face and Joan Nestle’s 2002 work “Genderqueer: Voices Beyond the Sexual Binary”, who describes herself as a “transexual lesbian feminist”.
Group Identity (1979), Psychology (Humanities)
A conveniently Marxist and really “profound” idea from psychology insinuating humans aren’t unique individuals but cloned members of tribes.
A theory formulated by social psychologist Henri Tajfel, starting around 1979 and culminating in a 1986 diatribe “The social identity theory of intergroup behaviour” whereby an “individual’s self-concept derived from perceived membership in a relevant social group”. Two years later in 1989, comes Crenshaw’s “intersectionality”.
Hegemon(y), Philosophy (Humanities)
A synonym people who want to sound intellectual™ use for biggest or most influential.
Originally from Ancient Greek, it was used in the 19th century to denote the global influence of European colonial powers (e.g. Britain as the “global hegemon”). Later adopted by Marx to describe the “cultural hegemony” of the ruling class, i.e. how it brainwashes people outside university to like capitalism.
Hermeneutic, Theology
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for a way of interpreting something.
Hate Speech (1948), Law (Humanities)
An attempt to politically separate some words from other words by inferring a person’s invisible and immeasurable intent, to make it possible for the State to prosecute them.
Hitler made “hate speeches”. The first emergence of the intent behind “hate speech” laws is evident in the negotiation between the UK and USSR while drafting the Universal Declaration of Human Rights(UDHR), wherein the Soviets fought to include “hate speech” provisions which were resisted on the basis they were intended to be used to silence freedom of expression and ideas like liberal democracy with vague definitions such as “the bloody dictatorship of the most reactionary section of capitalism and monopolies” (fascism). Modern legal usage was popularised by critical race theorist and self-acclaimed “activist scholar” Mari Matsuda in her 1989 article “Public Response to Racist Speech: Considering the Victim’s Story”.
Heteronormative (1991), Sociology (Humanities)
The idea 97%+ of people across cultures all over the world being attracted to the opposite sex could be considered normal or typical.
Popularized through Sokal’s favourite journal Social Text in 1991 in Michael Warner’s dreadful essay: “Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet”.
Heuristic
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for a way of guessing.
Homophobia (1969), Psychology (Humanities)
A 3000+-year old religious-inspired belief that the practice of homosexuality is immoral, spread over 50+ of the worlds’ countries.
A term coined in 1969 by (straight) psychotherapist George Weinberg in gay porn magazine Screw to describe the fear of heterosexual men that they might themselves be gay, after people were mean to his lesbian friend. Later elaborated on in his 1972 book “Society and the Healthy Homosexual” with an unsubstantiated claim it was a “medical phobia” in response to a perceived “contagion” based in “homosexual panic”.
Human Resources (1958), Sociology (Humanities)
Staffing. Personnel. Personal executioner department of a CEO masquerading as a unit for workers’ rights.
Although mentioned in similar ways back to 1915, the first use of the term “Human Resources” comes from a report for the Yale Labor and Management Center titled “The Human Resources Function” by sociology professor Edward Bakke.
Hypermasculinity (1984), Psychology (Humanities)
Macho. Being a bit too manly and not asking for the vegan soy latte you should have.
Set on a course to prove masculinity is a disorder which needs a cure, psychologists Donald Mosher and Mark Sirkin “developed” the idiotic “Hypermasculinity Inventory” (HMI) in 1984 with their paper “Measuring a macho personality constellation” in the Journal of Research in Personality. It’s the new “toxic masculinity”. Public money well spent.
I Feel Like (1995), Education
A “softer” and more feminine way to say “I think”, “I believe”, “I observed”, or other direct phrases which are less frightening to people who rarely do such things.
This irritating trend can be traced directly back to a 1986 paper “Sexism in the Classroom” by Maya Sadker and David Sadker. They also wrote “Failing At Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls” in 1995.
-icity”
A suffix people who want to sound intellectual™ add to other words to make them sound more sophisticated.
You can find it everywhere, but most likely, it’s almost certainly envy of Jung’s cool word synchronicity, which he detailed in “Synchronicity: An Acausal Connecting Principle” (1960).
Incel (1993), Internet
Young men who haven’t figured out how to communicate with women, and end up murdering them instead.
The term was invented by a Canadian woman who ran a blog from 1993–2000 titled “Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”. 15 years later, a psychopathic murderer named Elliot Rodger killed 3 men and 3 women in a rampage. Since then, it’s been feminists’ favourite symbolic bogeyman for their lives of oppression.
Influencer (2004), Internet
Narcissist braggart and/or social climber who pays dubious software providers to artificially increase “followers” and “likes” on their social media accounts so they can extort companies for freebies.
The idea of marketing by influence stems from Marlboro Man and Old Spice, through multi-level marketing, to celebrity endorsement and film product placement, all the way to the 1990 concept of “thought leadership”. It’s difficult to pinpoint an exact date for the birth of “social media influence”, but Airbnb’s 2004 “collaboration” with Mariah Carey appears to be a prominent milestone.
Identify As (1990), Psychology (Humanities)
Impressive-sounding and intellectual™ way to say “I am” or describe which caricature, avatar, or social construct you believe you are at that moment.
Just like superheroes in Marvel films or referring to yourself in the third person, social psychologist John Turner formulated a way to avoid the phenomena of complex social negotiations such as recognition, reputation, and self-concept with his 1990 “Self Categorisation Theory”.
Interdisciplinary (1937), Sociology (Humanities)
Having no subject or knowledge of its own to discuss. Useless, or syncretic. A bit like a DJ mixing other peoples’ music together.
Chemistry is a discipline. As is medicine, physics, biology, mathematics, literature, or astronomy. The first known usage of the term is from a notice of the availability of fellowships for the American Council of Learned Societies reprinted in the Journal of Educational Sociologyreferred to “training of an interdisciplinary nature”.
Internalized Oppression / Misogyny (1930), Psychology (Humanities)
The intellectual™-sounding reason extremists claiming to represent entire minority groups give for individual members of those groups disagreeing with them: because as Freud said, they don’t know they actually hate themselves.
The roots of “internalisation” go right back to Georg Hegel’s Master–slave dialectic, but owe their core to Fraud’s psychoanalytic theories detailed in his 1930 book “Civilization and its discontents”. French Philosopher Michel Foucault and his fetish for gay sex dungeons continued the guesswork in his 1961 disaster “Madness and Civilization”. In 1971, William Cross Jr kickstarted internalized racism with the Negrescence Model of black identity, which naturally lead to internalized sexism in 2008 (“The fabric of internalized sexism”), which then became misogyny, and on. and on.
Interpolated
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for injected ormixed.
Intersectionality (1988), Feminist Literature
Like the word you would use for when two streets form a crossing, but with a new ending which creates a word which sounds far more intellectual™. The modern framework for competitive victimhood in identity politics.
“Inspired” by Turner and Tajfel, black critical race theory feminist and Anita Hill legal counsel Kimberle Crenshaw published “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics” in 1988, which argued sexism was worse if you were black. Finally, a unified theory where white, cisgender, capitalist men are responsible for basically everything.
Islamophobia (1997), Political Rhetoric
The belief a dislike of Islamic values and/or revulsion to Jihadist violence is equivalent to the historical persecution of Jews.
In 1997- 4 years before 9/11 — , the British Home Secretary, Jack Straw published a report by the Runnymede Trust’s Commission on British Muslims and Islamophobia entitled “Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All”. An alternative French etymology claims it was invented in Iran after the Islamic Revolution to “counter” American feminists. The term was first used around 1923 in The Journal of Theological Studies.
(Social/Climate) Justice (1971), Philosophy (Humanities)
Activist Boomer/Gen-X professors indoctrinating Millennial/Gen-Z students to act as a resentful Internet mob demanding safe spaces and communism for their enemies’ sin of denying them the occupation of the top social strata.
Social justice is as old as humanity and is addressed at length in the Talmud. The contemporary term can be attributed to an entanglement of Marx’s ideas and the work of John Rawls, who published the inimitable “A Theory of Justice” in 1971. The pejorative term “social justice warrior” (“SJW”) has been used as far back as 1991 (“Quebec nationalists and Canadian union activist Michel Chartrand”) but became a mainstream insult between 2008–2011 as the Gamergate scandal emerged.
Language Creates Reality (1953), Linguistics
Change the word for something, change what the reality of what it is.
Edward Safir, one of the fathers of linguistics, taught a smart student named Benjamin Whorf. After Whorf died, interest grew in the unofficial Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic relativity: which posited there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another language. The theory was corrupted in the 80s via Phenomenology to support the ideas of social constructionism.
Latinx (2008), Social Media
A hilariously futile attempt by white left-wing activists to refer to people whose entire language and culture are based on gender, and who do not want to exclude gender as they celebrate it — in a way which doesn’t specify gender.
Despite the hilarious claims it has been used for hundreds of years, the term appears to have emerged in 2008 on social media, although having been seen in entertainment circles as a casting abbreviation. The first academic “paper” on it was “Mapping and recontextualizing the evolution of the term Latinx: An environmental scanning in higher education” by Adele Lozano Cristobal Salinas, in the highly-credible-sounding Journal of Latinos and Education.
Law of Attraction (1877), Literature
The more you think about something, it will magically appear. And make you a lot of money.
Popularized by Oprah advertising Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book “The Secret” (which she wrote after reading Wallace Wattles’ “The Science of Getting Rich”), the New Thought concept of thinking oneself into wealth is derived from Phileas Quimby’s “mental healing” movement from 1865, which he embarked on creating after being obsessed with Mesmerism. The term was first coined by theosophist Helena Blavatskyin an 1877 book of the same name.
Left Wing (1789), History (Humanities)
The centrist orthodoxy of compassion and inclusion which all reasonable people accept and believe. Only ever used by Nazis. The only true conclusion for an intellectual™.
The concepts of Left and Right wings originated from the seating arrangement in the French parliament after the French Revolution. Aristocrats sat on the right of the king (defenders preserving traditional, aristocratic, capitalistic, royal interests) and commoners sat on the left (innovators agitating for reform, republicanism, socialism, and civil liberties). The extreme or far-left refers to the left of social democracy, such as communism, anarchism, Marxism–Leninism, Trotskyism, and Maoism.
Lifestyle (1961), Sociology (Humanities)
In 1929, Austrian psychologist Alfred Adler described a “life-style” in “Problems of neurosis: a book of case-histories” as “a person’s basic character as established early in childhood”. By 1961, it had morphed to meaning a person’s mode or style of living (via usage from the art) and spawned a dubious concept in sociology, as well a marketing technique for JC Penny in 1977 (“life style marketing”) and a new magazine topic.
Love is Love (1984), Music
Meaningless doublespeak slogan repeated by celebrities, implying indiscriminate sexual behaviour is entirely virtuous if it is classed as “love” (as Catholic priests often claim).
An upgrade from “we’re here, we’re queer, get used to it” and “some people are gay, get used to it”, the phrase appears to derive from the 1984 song of the same name by Culture Club.
Male Gaze (1975), Feminist Literature
Filmmakers making women look sexy.
A self-confessed attempt by British feminist film critic Laura Mulvey in her 1973 essay ”Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” to use French Philosopher and “math genius” Jacques Lacan’s idiotic ideas as a political “weapon”.
Meritocracy (1956), Sociology (Humanities)
The unjust exclusion of unqualified people from positions of responsibility which require qualification.
A term referenced from a 1956 Socialist publication (A. Fox in Socialist Comm) by British Labour party activist/sociologist Baron Michael Young of Darlington in his 1950 satirical article “The Rise of the Meritocracy” for the Fabian Society.
Microaggression (1970), Literature
Being patronising or condescending. In a small, irrelevant way.
Coined by black psychiatrist Chester Pierce in regards to the “little ways” he saw black people being spoken down to, mentioned in the 1970 section “Offensive Mechanisms” from “The Black Seventies” by Floyd Barbour. It went on to form a structural part of Critical Race Theory.
Mindfulness (1979), Psychology (Humanities)
A new personal superpower invented by white people who like Yoga, to make them immune from anxiety over First World Problems.
Buddhist meditation. Often decried as “McMindfulness”, the modern “movement” of being more considerate as a person without needing all that complex religious stuff, gained influence from intellectual™ people in psychology who liked Jon Kabat-Zinn’s “karmic reassignment”, the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program at the “Center for Mindfulness” at Massachusetts Medical School, which was founded in 1979.
Misogyny (2000), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
Criticising someone born with ovaries who promotes bad ideas or acts stupidly. A racist, against women.
Although the term has existed since the 17th century as a term for the hatred of women, the modern perversion of the word to imply “prejudice” against women emerged around 2000, in the Encyclopedia of Feminist Theories, the International Encyclopedia of Women, and the Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology.
Motivation (1980s), Business
A pleasurable feeling experienced as a result of exercising discipline.
Traditionally referring to a motive or justification, the contemporary concept of motivation as a “feeling” — i.e. motivational posts, courses, speeches, and coaching — can broadly be attributed to the Human Potential Movement, the development of TV sports, 80s-style televangelism, and con-artist-founded courses such as “Dare To Be Great” by Glenn Turner.
Ms (1966), Literature
Fashionable title for an unmarried woman who may or may not be someone’s mistress.
Originally an abbreviation for “mistress”. A friend of Gloria Steinem heard a WBAI-radio interview with Sheila Michaels “The Feminists” group and suggested it as a title for her new magazine. The magazine Ms. arrived on newsstands in January 1972.
Multicultural(ism) (1965), Sociology
A magical sci-fi Marxist paradise where people with entirely different and conflicting religious beliefs, moral values, and social norms live mixed together in total utopian harmony.
The concept of multi-culturalism originated in Canada after the Holocaust and decolonisation as “biculturalism”, (“the Canadian mosaic”) through the struggles for co-existence between English and French language via the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism (1963–1969). Due to the need for immigration, it became national policy in 1971, as it also did in Australia in 1973. The EU followed. The “Godfather” of multiculturalism was Jamaican Marxist, founder of New Left Review and Foucault-loving Cultural TheoristStuart Hall, who also blatantly ripped off Derrida. Unsurprisingly, in 1990, Marxism Today praised the whole idea, despite everyone else writing it off as a total failure.
Multiple Genders (1990), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
The novel idea that which dangly bits you have has nothing to do with what your mind thinks you are, and you act it all out anyway. It’s just society, duh.
From the anti-Zionist Matriarch of Queer everything: professor of Foucault at Berkeley, a previous winner of the award for worst writing, and self-described Jewish Marxist lesbian, Judith Butler. In her virtually impenetrable scripture “Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity” (1990), the high priestess of Woke claims gender isn’t related to biology and is merely a “performance”.
Narrative (1984), Literature
A synonym people who want to sound intellectual™ use for story. As Derrida said it’s told by a narrator and therefore can’t be trusted.
Perverted from its original meaning within Lyotard’s 1984 nonsense “The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge”.
Neo
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for new-ish.
No
A harmful word which is deeply hurtful to people’s feelings and should never, ever be used because it’s an act of oppression.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mgKnKBdpnKc
Non-Binary (1995), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
Not classifiable by science as one of the two forms of homo sapiens. Like Derrida said.
The origin of the term is unclear, but it is most likely associated with the same Derrida-obsessed “scholars” who came up with “Genderqueer” in the 90s. Possibly in Usenet group soc.support.transgendered.
Normative
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for normal.
Of Color (1977), Literature
Alternative for racist term “colored” used by intellectual™-sounding people for anyone with brown skin as an attempt to appear “reverent” towards those they are being condescending to.
Aside from how stupid the term actually is when considering the opposite of colour is transparent, the intent of the phrase is ambiguous: from Martin Luther King Jr use of “citizens of color”, to the National Women’s Conference’s declaration of “women of colour” in 1977, to teacher manuals circulated in Academia around 1997 (e.g. “Teaching for Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook”), the term is universally attributed to 18th century vocabulary for “black person” or “mixed race”. For example, in 1797, Bryan Edwards notes in “An Historical Survey of the French Colony in the Island of St. Domingo” sentences such as ”The class which, by a strange abuse of language, is called people of colour, originates from an intermixture of the whites and the blacks.”
Optics (2011), Political Rhetoric
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for appearance.
Optics are the scientific study of light and vision. That was, until President Jimmy Carter’s special counsel on inflation, Robert Strauss, misused the term in 1978. However, the contemporary abuse of this doublespeak found its legs during the Libya crsis of Barack Obama’s reign in 2011, as the media needed a word which sounded smarter.
(Sexual) Orientation (1946), Psychiatry (Sciences)
A Derrida-inspired perversion of the medical concept of “disorientation” into a geographic/pathfinding compass. Like a “spectrum”.
The origin is unclear, but the term was originally defined as a “process” of orientation (1931), and then as the concept of “deviant sexual orientation” by feminist psychologist Georgene Seward in her 1946 paper “Sex and the Social Order” which claimed “Deviant sexual orientation in later life may originate in the child’s inability to identify himself with his like-sexed parent”. You only need to orientate yourself if you don’t know where you are.
Pan (1914), Psychology (Humanities)
Entirely indiscriminate, amoral, promiscuous, undiscerning, indifferent.
The Greek word “pan” means “all” or “every”. In Pantheism, “all things” are god; in Panentheism, god is in all things and outside it. The idea of “pansexual” behaviour is derived from Freud’s theory of the Sex Instinct(libido) underlying all behaviour (Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 1914), which was universally…panned.
Paradigm
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for a way things are done.
Participation Trophies (1966), Sports
You’re the “last winner”.
Despite protestations they are nothing new, the term was popularized in a 1966 article in the Amsterdam News about a Brooklyn poverty recreation program titled “A Thousand Kids Earn Trophies”.
The Patriarchy (1970), Feminist Literature
Like The Illuminati, The Jews, and The Aliens, a sinister tyranny of rich, capitalist, cisgender white supremacist men aiming to generationally enslave women as broodmares for producing more white supremacist capitalist offspring. Something which has to be smashed so we can all live in huts again.
Originally a term for “fatherhood” (paternity, patrimonial) or the church (as in Abraham being the Patriarch of nations or the Pope as Patriarch), patriarchal structure has been debated back into the 18th century. The revealer of the scary conspiracy is generally considered to be lesbian feminist Kate Millett, in her 1970 rant “Sexual Politics”, where maleness is pretty much the cause of all suppression and rape. She didn’t like her mother either and suffered rather heavily from mental illness.
Performativity (1955), Linguistics (Humanities)
Putting on make-up or wearing heels. Adopting a role or persona in a social situation to convince others of something about you, e.g. writing papers using the word “performativity” instead of “performance” to appear intellectual™.
The French Philospher’s favourite idea of speech being an “act” was introduced by British philosopher John Austin around 1955 in his concept of the “performative utterance” as he thought about the idea of making a promise to someone. To date, it’s referred to as “speech act theory” even though… it was never a formal theory, and it had nothing to do with speech being an act.
The Personal is Political (1969), Feminist Literature
A banshee cry for Stepford wives to encourage them to initiate a constructive dialogue with the political enemies of 2nd wave feminism.
From an essay of the same name in 1969 by Women’s Liberation Movement member and arch-TERF Carol Hanisch. Later echoed by Saul Alinsky in 1971 as Rule #10 from extremist handbook “Rules for Radicals”.
Preferred Pronoun (1970), Feminist Literature
Your human right to be referred to in the third person, plural, or by words you have personally entered into the English language on a whim, which others must use under fear of prosecution, even if they sound like noises from a gurgling infant.
Not a day goes by when the date strange pronouns were allegedly first used is conveniently moved back. The etymology of the increasingly large collection is sporadic — to say the least — but inspired largely by sci-fi literacy. In 1970 “feminist writer” Mary Orovan created “co” from usage observed in a set of Virginia anarcho-comnunist camps, and in 1996 Kate Bornstein introduced ze and hir in a bad novel. The University of Vermont appears to have led the trend of asking in students for their “pronoun” in 2015. It’s been going on for 150 years. It’s never panned out.
Prejudice plus (Institutional) Power (1970), Education
A childlike Lacan-esque way to explain the hideous complexity of racism in formulaic terms.
A classic example of single-cause fallacy (oversimplification). The inflammatory phrase was coined by Patricia Bidol in her 1970 book “Developing New Perspectives on Race: An Innovative Multi-media Social Studies Curriculum in Racism Awareness for the Secondary Level”. It was popularized eight years later in British “thought leader” Judith Katz‘s “White Awareness: Handbook for Anti-Racism Training”.
Phobia (1969), Psychotherapy (Humanities)
A powerful suffix which can instantly stigmatize anyone at all just by adding to any other word, making it sound like a legitimate medical condition only non-intellectual™ people wouldn’t know.
Original a psychiatric term denoting a panic-inducing morbid terror and avoidance of something (e.g. spiders, snakes, rabies/water), the usage of “phobia” to denote irrational dislike was introduced as a “descriptor for the intolerant” by psychotherapist George Weinberg’s guesswork in a pornographic magazine. Phobos (Greek) originally meant “flight” in the sense of “swiftly running” (from the Proto-Indo-European root meaning “to run”), the meaning that Homer intended when the word appeared in The Iliad and The Odyssey. Only thereafter did it become the common word for “fear” due to its association with “fleeing” in a panic or a fright, before it was added to social descriptors at the start of the 18th century.
Populism (1892), Sociology (Humanities)
Hitler-wannabes appealing to unenlightened people who aren’t intellectual™ you can’t really get away with calling racist because there are too many.
Although it’s a concept which has been around forever, the name itself is a moniker adopted by the People’s Party, which attempted to break the Dem/GOP duopoly at the 1892 elections. Generally attributed in contemporary terms to the analysis given in John Allcock’s “Populism: A Brief Biography” in Sociology (1971). It’s also a noticeably French idea. Recently, it’s just wannabe-journalists who need a way to avoid being sued.
Porn (1969), Literature
Art. The harmless relationship-enhancing activity of watching empowered strangers engage in sexual behaviour for financial reward.
Derived from porne (prostitute) and graphein (to record), “a written description or illustration of prostitutes or prostitution” entered French vocabulary in 1857. Denmark first legalised its publication in 1969, it was defined as “art” during Hustler Magazine v. Falwell in 1988, and it finally became universal to children of any age, anywhere, en masse, since the launch of Youtube-style sites in 2010 through one company in Quebec (Mindgeek).
Post-[somethingism] (1955), Philosophy (Humanities)
Anti. Against. A handy placeholder term to put in front of any “ism” word you invented, indicating progress and edgy “discourse”; regardless if it has any merit or makes any sense. The most intellectual™ kind of “discourse”.
Postmodernism (anti-modernism), post-Structuralism (anti-Structuralism), post-Postmodernism (anti-Postmodernism), post-materialism (anti-Materialism), post-colonialism (anti-Colonialism), post-Genderism, post-humanism, post-Contemporary, post-Hegemony, post-Theism, you name it. After 1955, it’s been The Thing to put before your new set of bad French philosophy ideas to disguise your dislike for the values you want to “critique” because they’re no longer fashionable — but you don’t want to sound mean. Hopefully, soon, the dawn will begin of Post-[Stupid]ism.
Or as so beautifully put on Urban Dictionary:
“Postmodernism is the ultimate lubricant invented by social sciences in order to fuck every concept and structure that humans ever came up with. At the same time it is used as a means for social sciences to penetrate one another.”
Post-Truth (1992), Philosophy
It doesn’t matter if it’s true or not. It’s how i feel.
A 1992 article by playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation claims “we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world”, possibly in reference to philosopher’s Hannah Arendt’s 1972 concept of “defactualization”. The term “post-truth politics” was coined in a blog of the same name for Grist magazine by “climate and energy” writer David Roberts after Brexit and Trump’s election victory in 2016.
Privilege (1988), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
Like Marx’s “Kapital”, a clever method of intellectualising resentment towards those who are lucky or have advantages others don’t. A form of secular Original Sin which can only be atoned for by public crawling.
Rarely aimed at China’s Politbureau, Castro, Islamic Mullahs, or anyone outside Western countries who share the same traits, the modern formularisation of middle-class self-hatred is broadly attributed to feminist “scholar” Peggy McIntosh’s 1988 paper “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences Through Work in Women’s Studies”.
Problematic
A synonym people who want to sound intellectual™ use for unwanted. Implies there might be some problems, but there is only ever one. For the same people.
Progress(ivism) (1850), Political Science
When a cannibal uses a fork. Whether the thing you want to change has changed to your personal liking, e.g. the opinions of millions of people.
Progressivism is derived from Progressism, both of which originated in the 1850s and relate to Kant’s idea of moving from barbarism to civilisation. Conveniently, a certain Karl Marx was influenced by Hegel’s fascination with the idea society’s progress related to its means’ of production and annotated his highly flawed Stages of History (which Engels called Historical Materialism in 1880). Progress, to Marx, was “evolving” from capitalism to communism, which is translated today as “moving forward” technologically.
Queer Theory (1991), Sociology (Humanities)
Foucault’s sex dungeon legacy: a radically-politicised area of study of those who do not fit into traditional social definitions informed by science.
Science likes to study abnormalities; sociology likes to politicise them. This “area of study” was coined by Foucault-loving Teresa de Lauretis, a professor of the “History of Consciousness” and expert-in-everything (err “feminist film theory”) in a 1991 essay for “Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies”, entitled “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities”. Her Wikipedia page is truly spectacular in its stupidity quotient. Well documented in “A Genealogy of Queer Theory” (2000) by William Turner.
Rape Culture (1974), Feminist Literature
Rape being normal, accepted, and OK in our Western countries because women exist and we all hate them.
Despite rape being generally punishable as a grave, morally-repugnant criminal offence with an average of 15–20-year sentence (albeit with a dreadful 2% conviction rate), and no evidence existing of a systemic belief or desire amongst 50% of the population to rape strangers or relatives due to being born male, the idea originated Noreen Connell’s “Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women by New York Radical Feminists” from the content of the 1971 New York Radical Feminists’ “Rape Conference”.
Reactionary (1917), Political Rhetoric
Someone who disagrees when an intellectual™ suggests what they think is a new idea, but is actually an old, bad idea.
First used to describe an opponent of the French Revolution (réactionnaire), it became the Marxist slur for those opposed to communism from the name given to those who fought against the Bolsheviks in the 1917 Russian Revolution. In 20th century politics, it became a term for anyone who opposed communism, from any side.
(Wealth) Redistribution (1817), Classical Economics
The idea an armed robber “redistributing” money from a bank vault is morally righteous if the bank has been keeping it for themselves as their property.
Although it’s largely an economic term (e.g. taxation) beginning with David Ricardo (“On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation”, 1817) and John Stuart Mill’s dad (John Mill), the concept is inexorably tied to Marx’s design for socialism in “Das Kapital”. Even after dekulakisation, contemporary social scientists are still puzzled over why it doesn’t work.
Relationship (1992), Business/Marketing
Any form of transaction with an animal, object, company, or brand. You don’t own a phone; you are in a relationship with it like you are your pet and have an experience which conveys intimacy. You’re not a customer; you’re part of the family.
Despite the enormous complexity of human relational structure and indicators, the idea of a company or corporation basing its marketing on long-term repetitive purchasing was broadly defined by Max Blackston’s 1992 piece, “Observations: Building Brand Equity by Managing the Brand’s Relationships” (Journal of Advertising Research).
Right Wing / Far Right (1906), Political Science
Anyone who is doubtful the communist utopia can be achieved or thinks it would be better not to break everything right now.
Related to the French Revolution (again), the subjective/relative phrase “far” was first discussed in Methodist publications which described the “extreme left” as radical socialists, and the “far right” as reactionary parties. Apparently, it’s all due to sexual repression, according to Wilhelm Reich in “The Mass Psychology of Fascism” (1933).
Safety / Stay Safe (1980s), Psychology (Humanities)
The most important thing in the whole world ever which has to come before anything else. Usually to prevent a lawsuit.
A favourite of soccer moms and frightened dads everywhere since the 1980s, but it’s impossible to track the origin of the term in any reliable way. In “The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure” (2018) Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt posit Australian psychologist Nick Haslam’s notion of “concept creep”, where, since the 1980s, key concepts in clinical and social psychology, including abuse, bullying, trauma and prejudice, have expanded both “downward” and “outward” to apply to less severe circumstances and to take in novel phenomena. The rise of “Health & Safety“ (HSE) regulation can be attributed to the US Occupational Safety and Health Act 1970 and the UK Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974.
Safe Space (1966), Feminist Literature
The adult form of an infant playpen.
Despite a parallel between the “sacred space” of paganism/witchcraft, activist Moira Kenney claims in her 2001 book “Mapping Gay L.A.: The Intersection of Place and Politics” the idea originated in gay and lesbian bars during the 60s to evade sodomy laws, as well as the Women’s Movement of the same time to seek “distance from men and patriarchal thought” in order to promote “consciousness raising”, according to Kathy Sarachild, a founder of pageant-disrupting wimmin’s lib group the New York Radical Women.
Self-Esteem (1965), Psychology (Humanities)
The notion of admiring yourself for the perfect little thing you are. What children should be made of.
In the mid-1960s, social psychologist Morris Rosenberg attempted to describe the idea of “conceiving the self”; naming it ” ‘self-esteem” (self-admiration) through his book “Society and the adolescent self-image”, and developed a scale (RSES) to “measure” it. Up until that time, it had been considered a pejorative expression of pride.
Sexism (1965), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
Being mean to women. A way to get some of that civil rights movement limelight being stolen by black people demanding suffrage.
First defined as belonging to a particular sex, it became a new fashionable-to-hate kind of racism by Director of Special Programs at Franklin and Marshall College, Pauline Leet, around 1965 at a Student-Faculty forum after the Morning Herald reported Hollywood compared it to Communism. Repeated again around 1968 in a speech by feminist author Caroline Bird to the Anglican church.
Sexual Liberation (1970), Feminist Literature
Unlimited freedom to imitate bonobos and chimpanzees without the crushing oppression of morality.
The father of the Sexual Revolution is undoubtedly Freud and his theories of female sexual repression. Two other factors are highly prominent: Kinsey’s research in the 1940s, and the invention fo the contraceptive pill in 1960. However, the undoubted epicentre of the issue’s politicisation was Germaine Greer’s 1970 polemic “The Female Eunuch” in which she argued the nuclear family represses women sexually and turns them into “eunuchs”. Greer later went on to reverse a lot of her stance and was banned by her own proteges.
Sex Work(er) (1979), Women’s Studies (Humanities)
Definitely not a prostitute. A word an intellectual™ uses to describe an entrepreneur sole trader running their own business of charging money in exchange for sex, or working to obtain cash through sex in person or videotape.
Author of “Unrepentant Whore” (2004), activist Carol Leigh suggested at the 1979 Women Against Violence in Pornography and Mediaconference we all just call it the “Sex Use Industry”, before her Marxian call “Sex Workers Unite!” in 1984. By 1987 it was “Sex Work: Writings By Women In The Sex Industry” by Frederique Delacoste and Priscilla Alexander.
Snowflake (2016), Film
Pussy.
Derived from self-esteem talk of being a “special unique snowflake” from a line in the 1999 movie “Fight Club” but widely popularized as a pejorative term for “Generation Snowflake” millennials in ABC’s sitcom “Last Man Standing” and Clare Fox’s 2017 book “I Find That Offensive” in which she blames “official multiculturalism’s relativistic conflation of tolerance with positive “recognition,” narcissistic identity politics, and finally therapeutic educational interventions such as anti-bullying campaigns”.
Social Construct (1966), Sociology (Humanities)
Something society made up all by itself which can be changed and engineered by re-programming bad people to think correctly.
Otherwise known as nurture or conditioning, but neither of those sound intellectual™ for things deriving from Freud like social constructivism.Borrowed from the economics term “fictional entities”, the discredited field of “phenomenology”, and Personal Construct Theory (psychoanalysis), sociologists Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmannattempted a disastrous response to the theory of Signs in a 1996 book “The Social Construction of Reality”. By 1982, Evelyn Kallen had translated it into law with “Ethnicity and human rights in Canada”.
Spectrum (1948), Psychology (Humanities)
Fashionable way to describe something which has variations similar to a colour chart despite there being no objective evidence it exists. Makes you sound scientific and intellectual™.
The electromagnetic spectrum quantitively measures the frequencies of light, radio/audio, and other phenomena. Kinsey’s research into sexual behaviour in 1948 led to sociologists misappropriating the nice colours of electromagnetic spectrographs to suggest a “spectrum” of human sexuality (1980, Michael Storm EROS scale) and “gender identity” (no legitimate sources, but widely discussed).
Spiritual, But Not Religious (1969), Unknown
A way of describing oneself as not foolish enough to be religious, but really profound regardless.
So achingly fashionable it has its own acronyms (SBNR, SBNA, or “Spiritual but not affiliated”). The idea is so broad is impossible to attribute to one book or paper, but is more in line with the New Age (of Aquarius) Movement which emerged after the Beatles’ popularisation of Hinduism around the time of Woodstock and the creation of the Esalen Institute in 1962 to promote the “Human Potential Movement”. Most recently canonised by Sven Erlandson’s 2000 book of the same name.
Straight White Male (1996), Political Science
Like a Great White Shark, but much worse. The origin of all historical evil, and the n-word for millennials.
There’s no doubt this particular slur is descended from WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) which was popularized by Andrew Hacker in his 1957 article “Liberal Democracy and Social Control” published in The American Political Science Review. Also related the concept of the “angry white male” courted electorally in the 90s. It’s impossible to say when and where the conjunction first arrived, but Crenshaw’s Intersectionality and McIntosh’s Privilege are almost certainly the root.
Stress Causes Illness (1962), Psychology (Humanities)
If you are predisposed to something, stress and bad life experiences will make you develop a disorder.
If might sound “medical”-ish. It’s not. In 1962, psychologist Paul Meehltried to explain schizophrenia. The resulting trend became referred to as the Diathesis–Stress Model, where the theory was the “equilibrium” of a person being disturbed would bring out a pre-existing condition.
Totality
A word people who want to sound intellectual™ use for sum or whole.
Troll (1992), Internet
Useful slur when being deliberately aggravated with information discrediting your extremist ideology. The only reason an intellectual™would ever face opposition.
Otherwise known as winding people up and/or asking deliberately stupid and inflammatory questions, trolling has been around since computing and the internet began — and even since 1972 in the US Air Force. Although nerds say it was prevalent during the late-80s, the earliest documented uses are on Usenet (alt.folklore.urban). In 1997, Steven Johnson described the behaviour in “Interface Culture: How New Technology Transforms the Way We Create and Communicate”.
Toxic Masculinity (1995), Sociology (Humanities)
The parts of masculinity which aren’t typically female, can be upsetting, and act similarly in nature to chemicals which poison workers in factories not wearing protective suits.
Derived from a Marxist idea of “hegemonic masculinity” in Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell’s “Gender Order Theory”. Although referenced in 1982, it was her 1995 book “Masculinities” which popularised the concept, after the term was directly used around 1990 for a New Republic article by Daniel Gross titled “The Gender Rap: ‘Toxic Masculinity’” (unavailable now, but discussed by Sculos). Unsurprisingly, Connell is a “trans-woman”, and somehow was a professor at Sydney.
Transgender (1965), Psychiatry (Sciences)
The imaginary ability to change one form of human into another merely with social engineering. Advanced and intellectual™ because it seems impossible.
In 1965, psychiatrist John Oliven published “Sexual Hygiene and Pathology” in the American Journal of the Medical Sciences, which included a definition of “transsexualism”. Four years later in 1969, the founder of cross-dressing magazine Transvestia, activist Virginia Prince, had begun to popularize the term with articles such as “The Expression of Femininity in the Male”. By 1984, the term was being regularly used in Female Mimics International.
Transgender Suicide Epidemic (2009), Psychology (Humanities)
The idea we can save Gender-dysphoric people from killing themselves in record numbers by making up genders, pumping kids with hormones, dating them, funding surgeries, and letting them use a different toilet.
A classic error of correlation vs causation. The World Health Organisation provides data on suicide rates. The most popularized study of transgender suicide cites a figure of 41% for ideation or “attempts” claimed by the Williams Institute of UCLA against a national average of ~4%. The data was preceded by “Suicide risk among transgender individuals” (2009) in Psychology & Sexuality, “Mental Health Disorders, Psychological Distress, and Suicidality in a Diverse Sample of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Youths” (2010), the “Transgender Mental Health Study 2012”, and it just keeps getting higher.
There is no suicide data for LGBT people because there is no data on LGBT people, to begin with. All of the studies are so flawed they are essentially useless — particularly because they ignore the co-morbidity of gender dysphoria with other serious mental illness (pointed out in 1997), which makes a causative diagnosis entirely impossible.
Transphobia (1993), Feminist Literature
Anything which undermines the reality-defying idea males can be females and females can be males, or that gender is linked to biology.
The first recorded usage was in the New Woman Conference’s “Rites of Passage” newsletter around 1993. The first usage in the popular press is in the same year, published in an article by the DC U.S. News and World Report.
Trigger (Warning) (1980), Psychiatry (Sciences)
Anything which might upset a fragile, infantilized, or sheltered person who has never been to war.
In medical science, individuals who had been through extraordinarily shocking circumstances (e.g. war) and had been diagnosed with trauma often re-experience the same symptoms on a conditioned Pavlovian basis. The post-Vietnam concept of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD) was entered into the DSM-III in 1980 through activism by Chaim Shatan, Robert Lifton, and their psychiatric colleagues. The contemporary usage of a “trigger warning”, according to Andi Zeisler, co-founder of feminist publication Bitch, originated on the community forum of Ms. Magazine’s website in the late-90s. By 2002, it had spreadto LiveJournal amongst teenage girls posting “pro-ana” blog articles.
My/Your Truth, Sociology (Humanities)
The limited subjective experience and opinion of teenage girls falsely represented as a form of objective truth and profound worldly wisdom. Useful to an intellectual™ who could easily be proven wrong objectively.
Objective truth is either true or false, can be wrong, and is about things. Subjective truth (opinion) is neither true or false, can’t be wrong, and is about feelings.
Unconscious (Implicit) Bias (1995), Psychology (Humanities)
The intent you didn’t know you had, but you actually did have. Like when you looked at that waitress.
The Holy Grail of the left-wing — a test for racism, SCIENCE! — was created by first defined by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald in 1995. They called it the Implicit Association Test (IAT). 20 years later, they disowned it, publicly stated it doesn’t predict biased behaviour, and urged it not be used for anything. Whoops.
( Ngram / Scholar )
Undocumented (1979), Political Rhetoric
Illegal. Not possessing legal documentation granted by a required legal process.
Although it appeared earlier, the term was popularized by US President Jimmy Carter, who instructed the term “illegal alien” be replaced when applying US immigration law. The current term arises from a 2013 suggestion by the Hispanic Leadership Network to US Republicans they use the term and drop “anchor baby”.
The Universe, Literature
A way of saying “God” without appearing religious. Particularly impressive if you seem intellectual™ and see, like, so many possibilities.
Buddhist cosmology, basically. Pantheism. Or arch-charlatan Deepak Chopra — whomever you want to blame for possible the stupidest idea imaginable. According to our current scientific understanding, the universe is 71.4% dark energy, 24% cold dark matter, and 4.6% atoms.
Unrealistic Beauty Standards (1990), Literature
Selling products to women by exploiting their insecurity and envy.
Although it’s well-known the “fairer” sex (“fair” being the old word for beauty) has been an axiom for centuries, the concept of “beauty standards” is attributable to its popularization in 1990 through Naomi Wolf’s book “The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty Are Used Against Women”, which kick-started third-wave feminism. Unfortunately, Wolf had her latest book recalled, because she didn’t bother to research the laws she was condemning. If ever there was a conclusion in need a theory, she’s your gal.
Vaccines Cause Autism (1998), Medicine (Sciences)
Vaccines are an unsafe experiment by the state which makes kids autistic.
Bizarrely, the idea vaccines are suspicious can be traced back to a storyline in “The X-Files” where the “Deep State” (the “Syndicate”) used bees to carry smallpox virus in preparation for colonisation. In 1998, The Lancet published a study of 12 autistic children (“Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children”) in which Andrew Wakefield and 11 other co-authors suggested a link to the MMR vaccine. It became known as the Lancet MMR autism fraud, was retracted in 2010, and Wakefield was struck off the medical register for serious professional misconduct.
Vegan (1944), Literature
A trendy, religious Hollywood slimming diet which also lets you protest against capitalist mass-production of meat and sacrifice yourself to prove plants are all we need.
Although humans have been biologically omnivorous for millennia, the epidemic of obesity from processed sugar and corn syrup from an unregulated, genetically-altered capitalist food supply chain has prompted celebrities like Paltrow to promote eating “clean”. From the 60s counter-culture emerged Frances Moore Lappe’s 1971 book “Diet for a Small Planet”, which was supplanted by climate change-linked “Diet for a New America” by John Robbins in 1987 and the hidden camera documentary “Earthlings” in 2005. However, the English animal activist founder of the Vegan Society who coined the term was Donald Watson, in 1944, in the first edition of “Vegan News”.
Wellness (1961), Literature
Not increasing your American employer’s healthcare costs. A more fashionable name for homoeopathy.
Credited to Halbert Dunn, chief of the US National Office of Vital Statistics and father of the alternative medicine “Wellness Movement”, in his 1961 book “High-Level Wellness”, which was derived from a series of 29 lectures at a Unitarian Church in Virginia. John Travis bought a copy in 1972 and founded the Wellness Resource Center in California as an “alternative” medicine clinic.
White Fragility (2011), Sociology (Humanities)
One woman’s total surprise that people don’t react too well to being slandered as racist on account of the melanin levels of their skin.
A new buzzphrase-on-rotation featured heavily from the paper of the same name published by Robin DiAngelo in the International Journal of Critical Pedagogy in 2011, and later in her 2018 book “White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”. A professor in hilariously-named “Whiteness Studies”.
White Supremacy (1989), Law
The notion the level of melanin present in a person’s skin is inversely proportional to their psychological belief they should rule over the earth.
Exemplified as a historical attitude for hundreds of years before the 60s through publications such as Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life)”, the contemporary notion is first attributed to Critical Race Theory activist and author of “Confessions of an Identity Politician” Frances Lee Ashley, who published “Stirring the Ashes: Race, Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship” in 1989.
(Stay) Woke (2008), Music
Painfully-cool perversion of the English language which bankrupts corporations.
In 2008, soul singer Erykah Badu released her album “New Amerykah Part One (4th World War)” containing the song “Master Teacher”. In 2014, Michael Brown was shot by police in Ferguson, Missouri, and it became synonymous with the ”Black Lives Matter” movement which emerged after the shooting of Trayvon Martin in 2013.
Women Are Defined By Men (1949), Literature
Humanity is male, and women are reproductive slaves who are relative to men. And children should have sex.
From the 1949 rant of a 38-year-old, unmarried, childless, and promiscuous bisexual French Marxist — to be fair, an interesting kind of person — complaining about the “Other” in her book “The Second Sex”, Simone de Beauvoir, who campaigned against the age of consent for children, and was banned from teaching for molesting a child.
Women Are Sexually Op/Repressed (1970), Literature
Being a wife and mother strips you of your sexiness.
It started with Freud, who studied ~50 frustrated aristocratic women in Austria, whom he deemed “men without penises” who “internalized” everything into their unconscious. In 1970, 7 years after Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique”, Australian legend Germaine Greer published “The Female Eunuch” in which she openly states “I don’t like women”. She also began the march towards “internalized misogyny”.
Words Create Reality (1886), Literature
Think about receiving lots of something enough and it will magically appear.
Currently toted by “Word of Faith” prosperity gospel preachers like Joel Osteen and Benny Hinn, the idea thoughts can affect the material world goes all the way back to Phileas Quimby’s origination of the New Thought movement and the Mesmerism-inspired tenets of Mental Science. Among them were Emma Curtis Hopkins, Prentice Mulford, and Mary Baker Eddy. Mulford’s 1886 essay “Your Forces and How to Use Them” is regarded as the movement’s seminal publication.
Yoga (1958), Literature
Exercise for people who are a bit too precious to make themselves undergo any strenuous effort. Also, profound.
Yoga (“union”) is Hindu pantheism; not exercise. Although it found its way into the US via the transcendentalists (Swami Vivekananda’s tours, along with Emerson and Blavatsky), it was the English translation of 1954 “Le Yoga: Immortalite et Liberte” by Romanian Mircea Eliadewhich found its way onto the bookshelves of musicians and artists in the lead-up to the Counter-Culture.
Xenophobia (1880), Political Rhetoric
Irrational, unreasonable and outdated biological survival instinct derived from the wariness of infectious diseases, carried by strangers, easily spread to other populations without immunity. A racist social construct.
Contrasted with “xenomania” and “xenophilia” in the London Daily News around 1880 — before it was a synonym for “racist” — the term was first used to describe a fear of “foreigners” or “the Other”, similar to agoraphobia, in 1903 repetitively in The Nation. It has no basis in science or medicine.
Zionism (1890), Political Rhetoric
Something suspicious and nationalistic both sets of extremists believe TheJews™ are up to. Favourite cause of intellectual™ people, because, Palestine.
“Zion” is a Hebrew translation for Jerusalem. The first use of the term is attributed to the Austrian Nathan Birnbaum, founder of the Kadimah nationalist Jewish students’ movement; he used the term in 1890 in his journal “Selbstemanzipation!”. “New” Anti-Semitism arose in 1967 after the Six-Day War. The Right hates TheJews™ because they control the financial system (or something), but the Left hate “them” because “they” apparently are a bunch of capitalist nationalists ruining the multicultural dream. The anti-Semitism problem on the has been out of control since Marx’s days.
A Chronology of Imposters and Idiocy
Just in case you needed it by the year, to understand the flow of the intellectual sewer up until now, it can be useful to look at it in context. Academics aren’t perfect. That doesn’t make their abject failure forgivable; it merely helps us to understand how they got so dumb standing on the shoulders of the bottom 2%.
Our idea of what is correct comes our sources of knowledge production — i.e. academia — and politics tends to be downstream from culture. The knowledge we produce and accumulate (i.e. epistemology) pervades into culture (literature, art, media etc), which is then portrayed, embodied, and represented by politicians as they produce legislation.
As the timeline below shows, it takes roughly 15–20 years for the garbage of academia to flow down the cultural sewer into everyday life. It’s now been 20 years since the Science Wars and 70 since anti-Modernism took hold, so there is yet still hope we will see a resurgence of sense.
Pre-20th Century
During the 19th century, we see a kickback against the industrial revolution which starts a movement of social change regarding wealth distribution.
- 16th C — Discourse (Theological term for discussion)
- 1751 — Dialectic (Philosophical term for interpretation)
- 1781 — Critique (Kant)
- 1789 — Left Wing (French Revolution)
- 1792 — Feminism (“A Vindication of the Rights of Woman”, Mary Wollstonecraft)
- 1817 — (Wealth) Redistribution (“On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation”, David Ricardo)
- 1850 — Progress(ivism) (Marx / Engels papers on production)
- 1875 — Equity (“Critique of the Gotha Program”, Karl Marx)
- 1877 — Law of Attraction (“The Law of Attraction”, Helena Blavatsky)
- 1880 — Xenophobia (The Nation, London Daily News)
- 1886 — Words Create Reality (“Your Forces and How to Use Them”, Prentice Mulford)
- 1890 — Zionism (“Selbstemanzipation!”, Nathan Birnbaum)
- 1892 — Populism (USA People’s Party)
Pre-WWII
Conflict with progressivism and Marx’s legacy grows as the first Communist state is established in the midst of the First World War and Britain reaches the height of empire. The era of psychoanalysis is born with Freud’s ideas and the Frankfurt school attempts to expand Marx’s ideas into other disciplines.
Kids born at the turn of the century are entering university with professors taught at the end of the Enlightenment.
- 1906 — Right Wing / Far Right (Methodist literature)
- 1912 — Direct Action (“Direct Action”, Voltairine de Cleyre)
- 1914 — Pan (Freud)
- 1915 — Fascist (Fascist Revolutionary Party)
- 1917 — Reactionary (soldiers resisting the Russian Revolution)
- 1921 — Dogpile (Sport metaphor)
- 1928 — Born in the Wrong Body (Sexual Inversion, Richard von Krafft-Ebing)
- 1930 — Internalized Oppression / Misogyny (“Civilization and its discontents”, Sigmund Freud)
- 1932 — Antifascist (Mussolini persecutes communists resisting)
- 1937 — Critical Theory (“Traditional and Critical Theory”, Max Horkheimer)
- 1937 — Interdisciplinary (Journal of Educational Sociology)
- 1939 — Essentialism (considered outdated)
1940s
Understandably, things take a slowdown with the outbreak of the Second World War. We start to see a scepticism towards institutions emerge, and sexuality and gender being explored.
Kids born in the 20s are entering university with professors taught at the turn of the century.
- Disinvite(d) (Californian universities issue speaker bans)
- 1943 — Gatekeeping (“Forces Behind Food Habits and Methods of Change”, Kurt Lewin)
- 1944 — Vegan (Establishment of Vegan Society, Donald Watson)
- 1946 — (Sexual) Orientation (“Sex and the Social Order”, Georgene Seward)
- 1948 — Spectrum (Kinsey Scale)
- 1948 — Hate Speech (USSR messes with the UN DoHR)
- 1949 — Women Are Defined By Men (“The Second Sex”, Simone de Beauvoir)
1950s
The social sciences gear up as post-modernism begins its stranglehold on every other discipline from its roots in Critical Theory. The importance of language and labels becomes emphasised, as conditions of the workplace are overhauled.
Kids born in the 30s (Silent Generation) are entering university with professors taught during the Great War.
- 1951 — Addiction (AMA classes it as a disease)
- 1953 — Language Creates Reality (Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis of linguistic relativity)
- 1955 — Performativity (Speech Act Theory, John Austin)
- 1955 — Post-[somethingism] (Postmodernism emerges from Critical Theory)
- 1956 — Climate Change (“The Carbon Dioxide Theory of Climatic Change”, Gilbert Plass)
- 1956 — Construct (Psychologists interrogate nurture)
- 1956 — Meritocracy (“The Rise of the Meritocracy”, Baron Michael Young)
- 1957 — Gender Pay Gap (“The Economics of Discrimination”, Gary Becker)
- 1958 — Human Resources (“The Human Resources Function”, Edward Bakke)
- 1958 — Yoga (“Le Yoga: Immortalite et Liberte”, Mircea Eliade)
1960s
This is where we see things go completely out of control: the Counter-Culture breeds radical feminism, sexual promiscuity, gender and sexuality politics, and a collective firehose of bad ideas. Decolonisation starts.
Kids born during and after the war (Boomers) are entering university with professors taught in the 20s and 30s between the World Wars.
- 1961 — Lifestyle (“Problems of neurosis: a book of case-histories”, Alfred Adler)
- 1961 — Wellness (“High-Level Wellness”, Halbert Dunn)
- 1962 — Stress Causes Illness (Diathesis–Stress Model)
- 1963 — ADHD (Keith Conners studies Ritalin usage)
- 1963 — Gender Neutral (Encyclopaedia of Mental Health, John Money)
- 1964 — Domesticity Is a Prison For Women (“The Feminine Mystique”, Betty Friedan)
- 1965 — Multicultural(ism) (Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, Canada)
- 1965 — Self-Esteem (“Society and the adolescent self-image”, Morris Rosenberg)
- 1965 — Sexism (Franklin and Marshall College, Pauline Leet)
- 1965 — Transgender (“Sexual Hygiene and Pathology”, John Oliven)
- 1966 — Participation Trophies (NY Amsterdam News)
- 1966 — Safe Space (evasion of sodomy laws, Women’s Lib)
- 1966 — Social Construct (“The Social Construction of Reality”, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann)
- 1967 — Binary/Deconstruction (“Of Grammatology”, Jacques Derrida)
- 1968 — Civil / Domestic Partnership (French concubinage law)
- 1968 — Emotional Support Animal (US Fair Housing Act)
- 1968 — Gender Identity (“Sex and Gender: On the Development of Masculinity and Femininity”, Robert Stoller)
- 1969 — Body Positivity (National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance)
- 1969 — Gay Liberation (Gay Liberation Front)
- 1969 — Homophobia/Phobia (George Weinberg, Screw)
- 1969 — Ms (Ms Magazine launches, Gloria Steinem)
- 1969 — The Personal is Political (“The Personal Is Political”, Carol Hanisch)
- 1969 — Porn (Denmark legalises it)
- 1969 — Spiritual, But Not Religious (Woodstock)
1970s
What the 60s started, the 70s took to a militant new level in an observable way. We see a noticeable dip in nuttiness towards the middle of the decade, but it’s back by the end like a spasm. Interestingly, feminist extremism goes hostile on the backdrop of the Sexual Revolution.
Kids born in the 50s (Boomers) are entering university with professors educated in the 30s and 40s.
- 1970 — Microaggression (“The Black Seventies”, Floyd Barbour)
- 1970 — The Patriarchy (“Sexual Politics”, Kate Millett)
- 1970 — Preferred Pronoun (Sci-Fi novels, anarchist communes)
- 1970 — Prejudice plus (Institutional) Power (“Developing New Perspectives on Race”, Patricia Bidol)
- 1970 — Sexual Liberation / Women Are Sexually Op/Repressed (“The Female Eunuch”, Germaine Greer)
- 1971 — (Social/Climate) Justice (“A Theory of Justice”, John Rawls)
- 1974 — Deplatform(ed) (Extremist Marxist students react to the National Front)
- 1974 — Rape Culture (“Rape: The First Sourcebook for Women by New York Radical Feminists”, Noreen Connell)
- 1975 — Everything is about power (Michel Foucault vomits out “Discipline and Punish”, before “A History of Sexuality”)
- 1975 — Male Gaze (“Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”, Laura Mulvey)
- 1977 — Of Color (National Women’s Conference)
- 1979 — Group Identity (“The social identity theory of intergroup behaviour”, Henri Tajfel)
- 1979 — Mindfulness (Center for Mindfulness, Jon Kabat-Zinn)
- 1979 — Sex Work(er) (Women Against Violence in Pornography and Media, Carol Leigh)
- 1979 — Undocumented (Jimmy Carter administration)
1980s
The era of Reagan and Thatcher calms the waters as glam-rock, AIDS, and Wall Street predominate the landscape. However, as the decade ends, the madness erupts louder than ever as Critical Race Theory is established in American law schools.
Kids born in the 60s (Gen-X) are entering university with professors taught in the 40s and 50s (Silent Generation).
- Motivation (seminars, conferences, televangelism)
- Safety / Stay Safe (AIDS, concept creep)
- 1980 — Trigger (PTSD added to DMS-III)
- 1981 — Ableism (Off Our Backs magazine)
- 1981 — Children Are Socialised Into Gender (Gender Schema Theory, Sandra Bern)
- 1984 — Hypermasculinity (“Measuring a macho personality constellation”, Donald Mosher and Mark Sirkin)
- 1984 — Love is Love (Culture Club anthem)
- 1984 — Narrative (“The Postmodern Condition”, Lyotard)
- 1988 — Dog Whistle (The Washington Post, Richard Morin)
- 1988 — Intersectionality (“Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex”, Kimberle Crenshaw)
- 1988 — Privilege (“White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account”, Peggy McIntosh)
- 1989 — African American (Activist conference, Jesse Jackson)
- 1989 — White Supremacy (“Stirring the Ashes: Race, Class and the Future of Civil Rights Scholarship”, Frances Lee Ashley)
1990s
With the fall of the USSR, the computing revolution, and severe kickback from the sciences at the humanities (the Science Wars), things take a real sci-fi turn as gender politics explode and business literature swings to abstraction. Gen-X accelerates into the stratosphere.
Kids born in the 70s (Gen-X) are entering university with professors taught in the 50s and 60s (Silent Generation).
- 1990 — Identify As (Self Categorisation Theory, John Turner)
- 1990 — Multiple Genders (“Gender Trouble”, Judith Butler)
- 1991 — Code of Conduct (Levi Strauss and Nike adopt ethics codes)
- 1991 — Heteronormative (“Introduction: Fear of a Queer Planet”, Michael Warner)
- 1991 — Queer Theory (“Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities”, Teresa de Lauretis)
- 1992 — Post-Truth (The Nation, Steve Tesich)
- 1992 — Relationship (“Building Brand Equity by Managing the Brand’s Relationships”, Max Blackston)
- 1992 — Troll (Usenet newsgroups)
- 1993 — Anxiety (Children being treated without a diagnosis of a disorder)
- 1993 — Incel (“Alana’s Involuntary Celibacy Project”, blog)
- 1993 — Transphobia (Rites of Passage, New Woman Conference)
- 1994 — Gender-fluid (“Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us”, Kate Bornstein)
- 1995 — Cisgender (Usenet, Carl Buijs)
- 1995 — Community (“Brand Community and the Sociology of Brands”, Albert Muniz and Thomas O’Guinn)
- Mid-90s — Biological Essentialism (attacks on science)
- 1995 — Gender Essentialism (“Space, time and perversion: essays on the politics of bodies”, Dean Elizabeth Grosz)
- 1995 — Genderqueer (In Your Face, Riki Wilchins)
- 1995 — I Feel Like (“Failing At Fairness: How Our Schools Cheat Girls”, Maya Sadker and David Sadker)
- 1995 — Non-Binary (Usenet)
- 1995 — Toxic Masculinity (“Masculinities”, Raewyn Connell)
- 1995 — Unconscious (Implicit) Bias (Implicit Association Test, Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald)
- 1996 — Dehumanising (“Eight Stages of Genocide”, Gregory Stanton)
- 1996 — Straight White Male (Electoral analysis of the “angry white male”)
- 1997 — Fashionable Nonsense (Alan Sokal hoax on Social Text)
- 1997 — Islamophobia (“Islamophobia: A Challenge for Us All”, Runnymede Trust)
- 1998 — Experience (“The Experience Economy”, Joseph Pine and James Gilmore)
- 1998 — Vaccines Cause Autism (“Ileal-lymphoid-nodular hyperplasia, non-specific colitis, and pervasive developmental disorder in children”, The Lancet/Andrew Wakefield)
- 1998 — Trigger Warning (Ms Magazine forums, LiveJournal)
2000s
With the tragedy of 9/11 and rise of Social Media, information disseminates so widely the academic hose is drowned out by new computer-related ideas from Silicon Valley and the speed of innovation blasts ahead. With the recession and police brutality dominating the headline, extremists from both sides realise the future of social media, as literature is dead and attention spans are limited.
Kids born in the 80s (Millennials/Gen-Y) are entering university with professors taught in the 60s and 70s (Boomers).
- 2000 — Democracy is an illusion (“Coping with Post-Democracy”, Colin Couch)
- 2000 — Misogyny (Blackwell Dictionary of Sociology, feminist encylopaedias)
- 2004 — Influencer (Mariah Carey takes product placement online with AirBnb)
- 2007 — Check Your Privilege (blogs, Internet)
- 2007 — Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (Diversity in Philanthropy Project starts promoting it)
- 2008 — Latinx (Social Media)
- 2008 — (Stay) Woke (“Master Teacher”, Erykah Badu)
- 2009 — Transgender Suicide Epidemic (“Suicide risk among transgender individuals”, Psychology & Sexuality)
2010s
Kids born in the 90s (Gen-Z) are entering university with professors taught in the 70s and 80s (Boomers).
- 2011 — Optics (Libya crisis)
- 2011 — White Fragility (“White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism”, Robin DiAngelo)
- 2014 — Assignment at Birth (Internet activism)
- 2014 — Cuck (Gamergate insult)
- 2016 — Snowflake (“Last Man Standing”, ABC)