'Brexitspeak' growing too fast for public to keep up, say experts
Linguist calls for help to build glossary of Brexit terms and of ‘toxic terminology of populism’
From snowflakes to Spartans and saboteurs to surrender, the vocabulary of Brexit is growing so fast and proving so slippery that the public risks losing track of what people are talking about, a leading language professor has said.
With the prime minister revelling in the use of military metaphors such as “surrender” to deride parliament’s opposition to a hard Brexit and Church of England bishops denouncing the “unacceptable” tone of political debate, Tony Thorne, a visiting linguistics consultant at King’s College London, is calling for help to build a public glossary of Brexitspeak and “the toxic terminology of populism”.
He has already gathered more than 200 terms that chart how political language has bloomed in recent years to close what academics call “lexical gaps”, as older terms were found wanting to describe a shattered political landscape, creating an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and doubt, or FUD.
“People ought to familiarise themselves otherwise they risk being bamboozled and duped,” says Thorne, a specialist in slang and jargon who also advises the police and courts on gang communication. “For more than a year I have been tracking the language of Brexit and populism we have developed on social media and in the mainstream media to talk about these things. A lot of the language is designed to trigger [emotions] rather than elucidate.”
www.theguardian.com/politics/2019/oct/05/brexitspeak-brexit-vocabulary-growing-too-fast-public-keep-up
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