BUT IS IT TRUTH?
The Pedant Class and Your Stars
THERE’S an old joke about a game ranger who is trying to decide which of two lions ate an Eastern European tourist. It ends with the punch line: “The Czech is always in the male.”
Now we’ve got that out of the way, let’s talk about post. I recently watched a charming 10-year-old film called The Missing Postman, in which a mailman forced into early retirement goes postal and sets off on his bicycle to deliver every letter from a stolen sack of mail, in the process becoming both a hunted criminal and a national hero.
This moving story made me sad about the inevitability of a postpost world in which there will be no more letters carried by people on red bicycles. After the mail goes, “post-man” will come to mean a post-apocalyptic era in which there are not only no people to deliver letters, but no people to write them either.
As depressing as that thought may be, it becomes positively ebullient when set against “posttruth”. So popular has this doltish term become that Oxford Dictionaries, the body that measures the scale of language earthquakes, named it Word of the Year for 2016.
That’s not an accolade, it simply means the new word most used on social networks.
Last year’s winner was the tearsof-joy emoticon, which some argued was not a word, but it has become so widely employed in place of “haha, very funny” that it was allowed special dispensation.
In the space of a year we have gone from a world laughing until it cries to an apathetic world that accepts the post-sentient idiocy of “post-truth”.
I don’t mind new words at all — a healthy language is a growing language — but I prefer words that edify and clarify to a skulking platitude of a word that drapes a cloak of pseudo-respectability over lies and deceit.
Post-truth is defined 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 is often used in the context of strongly emotive claims made by politicians, many of which are, for want of a better word, fibs.
As a small example, in a postpost world without postmen, if someone told you, “The cheque is in the mail,” this would be a blatant lie. If, however, you were perversely reassured by the speaker’s emotional intention, despite the invalidity of his statement, the downright falsehood might be upgraded to “post-truth” status.
This odious excuse for a word reminds me of postmodernism, which has fallen out of fashion but was for too long a device by which pretentious nonsense was made to sound lofty and important.
Literary theorist Terry Eagleton explained postmodernism as “the contemporary movement of thought which rejects [among other things] the possibility of objective knowledge”. In his famous essay Postmodernism Disrobed, iconoclast Richard Dawkins ripped the mask off this pretender, calling it “the vacuous rhetoric of mountebanks and charlatans”.
There is, unfortunately, no irony implicit in “post-truth”. It is, if anything, post-ironic. The post-ironic movement (let’s be serious, people) was for a time associated with “New Sincerity” (also known as postpostmodernism), a position adopted by creative types who thought satire had no place in the arts.
What is ironic is that post-truth has quite a lot in common with New Sincerity. Neither is sincere or truthful and neither is funny.
Let’s hope next year brings us a better word. In the meantime, let’s tear the euphemistic packaging off “post-truth” and expose it for what it is — an empty can of air-freshener trying to disguise the smell of an open sewer. LS
There is, unfortunately, no irony implicit in ‘post-truth’