2016: Post-truth, Trump and Brexit

If words can sum up a year then these are the three words that reverberated across the world in 2016 - Post-truth, Trump and Brexit.

The Oxford Dictionaries has chosen ‘post-truth’ as the Word of the Year 2016. It’s an adjective defined in the dictionary as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”

It has also become associated with a particular noun, in the phrase post-truth politics.

According to Oxford, the concept of post-truth has been in existence for the past decade, but it spiked in frequency in 2016 in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States.

In 2016, post-truth has gone from being a peripheral term to being a mainstay in political commentary, now often being used by major publications without the need for clarification or definition in their headlines.

British novelist Howard Jacobson related post-truth with George Orwell’s ‘negative utopia’ of 1984. Post-truth is two plus two equal to five. In 1984, the big brother redefined the mathematics to the people. Nowaday, people redefined it for themselves.

Talking to BBC, he said in place of Orwell’s ‘ministry of truth’ we have Facebook and twitter where emotion and personal belief parade as veracity and objective facts. Scorn is the tool of metropolitan elites.

The term post-truth has moved from being relatively new to being widely understood in the course of a year - demonstrating its impact on the national and international consciousness.

The compound word post-truth exemplifies an expansion in the meaning of the prefix post-that has become increasingly prominent in recent years.

Britain’s Bexit firebrand Nigel Farage, leader of the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP), arrives at Republican president-elect Donald Trump's Trump Tower in New York, US Nov 12, 2016. Reuters

‘Post-truth’ seems to have been first used in this meaning in a 1992 essay by the late Serbian-American playwright Steve Tesich in The Nation magazine. Reflecting on the Iran-Contra scandal and the Persian Gulf War, Tesich lamented that ‘we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to live in some post-truth world’.

Moreover, a book, The Post-truth Era, by Ralph Keyes appeared in 2004, and in 2005 American comedian Stephen Colbert popularized an informal word relating to the same concept: truthiness, defined by Oxford Dictionaries as ‘the quality of seeming or being felt to be true, even if not necessarily true’.

Post-truth extends that notion from an isolated quality of particular assertions to a general characteristic of our age.

Then, it was the Brexit. It’s a portmanteau word of ‘British’ and ‘exit’. It became a shorthand way of saying the UK leaving the 28-member European block, EU. A referendum (which is also termed Brexit referendum) was held in the UK on Jun 23. Some 52 percent of British people voted in favour of ‘Brexit’ against 48 percent who opposed it. There was a 71.8 percent turnout in the referendum with more that 30 million people voting.

The word has produced a derivative which is called Brexiteer – a person who is in favour of the UK withdrawing from the EU.

Then it was trump. The word became much uttered and heard internationally because of American elections in which Donald Trump elected as next US president.

According to novelist Howard Jacobson, trump is a fertile word. As a noun it can mean a hollow tube one who summons loudly like a trumpet, a playing card of the suit chosen to rank above others or a thing of small value, and as a verb it means to deceive and cheat to obstruct, to forge, to fabricate and invent, and to break wind audibly.

Post-truth is a word used by Trump many times in his presidential campaign speech and twitter posts, while Brexit is replicated by the similar campaigners in Greece who called it ‘Grexit’ or Greek exit from the EU.