West’s modern English dictionary

My neologisms of 2022

I take a great interest in linguistic trends, and over the years I’ve been compiling a dictionary of political neologisms. ‘Compiling’ perhaps might be a bit over-egging it, as if I’m Samuel Johnson: I have about 300 new terms in my miscellany (including words that have been redefined). I’ve said this before, but one reason why progressive ideas are so successful is that progressives are very prolific in coining new terms, and then using mild social pressure to get contemporaries to use them. This has been happening since the 1960s, but even since 2020 there’s been a surge of new or newly-popular terms, which I have attempted to compile below; more suggestions welcome in the comments, and I might upload the entire dictionary at some point.

Meanwhile, this post on academia’s mind-virus also features many other terms, including ableism, which one academic described as ‘the value system of ablenormativity which privileges the supposedly neurotypical and ablebodied, while disableism might describe the violent oppression targeting people whose bodyminds are deemed deviant and thus disabled. In other words, ableism is to heterosexism what disableism is to queerantagonism.’