3 Words I’ve Learned Recently — But Wish I Hadn’t
Has the ‘infodemic’ given you a headache? Do you live in a ‘kakistocracy’? Don’t say ‘no’ until you hear the definitions
As a book critic, I hear a lot of canaries singing in coal mines.
Some of their songs consist of new words or phrases I see in advance reader’s copies of books, terms used by specialists but not yet by the rest of us. Others are older expressions given fresh life by trends like mutating viruses or rising censorship.
Recently I’ve learned words or phrases so alarming, I wish no one had needed to use them. Here are the top three.
1 “Infodemic”
Infodemic — short for “information epidemic” — arrived with the SARS outbreak in 2003. But it’s come into wider use during the Covid-19 pandemic.
The meaning of infodemic depends partly on who’s using the word. The World Health Organization defines it as “too much information,” whether it’s true or false and online or off-. An “infodemic” causes confusion, fosters mistrust, leads to risky behavior, and makes it harder to contain an epidemic, the WHO says.
Other experts see the word in starker terms. In their forthcoming The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free (Columbia Global Reports, 2022), the journalists Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney define an “infodemic” as “a deluge of lies, distortions, and bungled communication” that hides or drowns out the truth.
Why you may be hearing “infodemic” more: Just look at the TV news, or your Facebook feed. Or remember Steve Bannon’s cynical comment: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.”
2 “GONGO”
Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) usually make no secret of their overall goals. They can’t raise money to support their cause if they don’t let people know what the cause is.
That’s not true of GONGOs. Their name stands for “government-operated non-governmental organizations,” and if that strikes you as a smoke-blowing, Orwellian contradiction in terms, you’re right.
