'Post-truth' beats 'chatbot' to Word of the Year Crown

Huh?

"“Post-truth” scored the prize because United Kingdom's Brexit vote and United States presidential election saw use of the word spike enormously."

Funny, this is the first time I recall seeing the term anywhere, and I do read quite a bit of political news and opinion, from a number of sources. I guess it's like that 'alt-right' term, used primarily by a small subset of the media to apply convenient labeling, but not by much of the general public.

Doesn't "Post-truth" sound...

.... very Newspeak? What's wrong with the old "propaganda" word?

Will the post-truth come out about post-truth?

Over here we have a worst word of the year award (in addition to the word of the year award).

Not sure in which category "post-truth" (which would be "Postfaktisch" over here) belongs.

I think the point about "post-truth" is that it exists in a particular place where people seem to be saying that something might actually not be the truth but they choose to act on it anyway. By implication, saying that truth doesn't matter or can be a matter of preference.

Truthiness

Truthiness is a quality characterizing a "truth" that a person making an argument or assertion claims to know intuitively "from the gut" or because it "feels right" without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.

American television comedian Stephen Colbert coined the word in this meaning as the subject of a segment called "The Wørd" during the pilot episode of his political satire program The Colbert Report on October 17, 2005. By using this as part of his routine, Colbert satirized the misuse of appeal to emotion and "gut feeling" as a rhetorical device in contemporaneous socio-political discourse.

Lol

Almost all politicians have been post-truth for decades.

It has only become a thing now one bunch of people decided they didn't like the lies a larger bunch of people believed (except they mostly didn't believe them anyway).

Post-truth has been working in the way politicians manage education for a number of years now. It started in the 90s. A lobby group would start up because they wanted a subject ( mainly, but not only, literacy) taught in a certain way that they believed in - essentially behaviourist, narrow with lots of measurable targets. They'd argue for their method with passion, conviction, appeals to emotion and lots of "It stands to reason" type statements, but no evidence to substantiate it. Then another group would start up ( often containing many of the same people) and argue for the same things, but would quote the first group as an authority, omitting to mention that none of it was actually proven. This would spawn a few times and gain enough traction to get support of some politicians and bring a few like-minded researchers (often not regular academics) on board, who'd conduct a small "study". The study would be narrow and wouldn't actually test the main hypothesis, just some small corner of it - in the sense of, " If you teach X the kids will get better at doing X" rather than "Learning X makes the kids learn better.".But that would be enough for the lobby group to quote it endlessly and accuse any opposition of "ignoring the science" and "damaging children". They'd simply shout down and ignore any evidence that contradicts this, for example, how memory actually works, and before you know it there's a new curriculum. In literacy it's Phonics.

My word of the year

At irregular intervals I by reading and listening to news and comment programmes, I become aware that certain words have become fashionable. The current favourite is "decade". Count how many examples you come across in the next week or so.