The Oxford English Dictionary’s 2016 Word of the Year is “post-truth.” And it was a perfect choice. Post-truth refers to a political and
social environment that exists not uniquely but preponderantly in the United
States in which the truth is a moving target, with opponents in argument each seeming
to have a separate set of facts to argue from. What’s more, persons predisposed
to one side of an argument are generally comfortable with the set
of facts that support their existing view of the issue and are likewise suspect
of the facts that support the side they oppose. Post-truth is a sausage skin, a
thin membrane of lexigraphy that holds together a great load of noxious material and
manages to make it seem less horrible than it is. It is an antiseptic and
prophylactic term in that way, reductive to the danger point, but it is indeed
efficient, and despite good, solid information never having been more at the ready, it
succinctly describes the alphabet soup of specious nonsense the fair debater is up against in a
post-truth America.
