The term “gender critical” is really a euphemism recently created to replace TERF with a phrase that doesn’t have such negative connotations. It’s perfectly analogous to the phrase “race realist”, which was invented by racists[…]
“Community” is derived from the Anglo-Norman and Middle French communité, meaning, primarily, “joint ownership.” A community, at least in theory, is a site of collective decision-making; it is maintained by the people who built it,[…]
Trump has been merciless toward anyone else in government who reveals his administration’s secrets, tweeting that ‘‘the real story that Congress, the F.B.I. and all others should be looking into is the leaking of Classified[…]
Pettiness often manifests itself as an outsize form of revenge — responding to mild slights by putting an absurd amount of energy into plotting meaningless reprisals. (One theory even claims this is how Donald Trump[…]
Through the whole late 20th century, “existential” floated through American conversation mostly as a kind of mush — a loose gesture in the general direction of a loosely grasped idea, something perhaps half-remembered from a[…]
The way we use “entitled” feels less strange when you consider that its two meanings have slightly different origins. Once upon a time, “entitlement” was, quite literally, something granted by a higher authority: A “noble”[…]
“Owned” is borrowed from hacker slang. If you got owned, that meant some hacker jimmied the lock on a virtual back door, snooped around your property and rifled through your stuff. The word speaks of[…]
In 2009, Michael B. Oren, soon to become Israel’s ambassador to the United States, wrote an essay for Commentary examining seven “existential” threats the nation faced — noting first how infrequently “modern states were threatened[…]
Politicization is the last refuge of the scoundrel. To “politicize” something — hurricanes, intelligence, science, football, gun violence — is to render it political in a way that distorts its true meaning. That, at least,[…]
Part of what makes the modern use of “winning” so strange is that it’s often used in contexts that are not competitions. The Trump campaign, for instance, only occasionally applied it to winnable things, like[…]
