The 7 Sad Synonyms for Post-Truth

Dear Jessica Brennan,

We are hearing a lot right now about how we are living in the post-truth era. How sad to even write these words. It is difficult to combat politics and the media when it comes to the truth, and I know that in the purest definition of this phrase “post-truth”, it is based on the observation that emotion, not actual fact, often forms public opinion. That being said, the phrase itself as it is thrown around, indicates so much more than emotion versus fact. After all it is now the phrase used to describe an entire era.

Of course as the public, we must learn to measure what we are hearing, with what our guts tell us and what history and science have already shown us, and we must, (particularly in large decisions like for instance who we will vote for), dig for the truth and be informed. Common-sense seems to agree. But greater than this I think we must resist the urge to become a part of the post-truth era movement in our day to day lives. For we are living in a time that commands us to be the most informed and authentic we have ever been and because we are connected like never before in the history of the world, we don’t have to accept, in fact have no excuse to accept this prognosis of limited or non-existent truth.

In order to dig into this subject I went back to the folks at the Oxford Dictionary, the very people who voted for “post-truth” as the 2016 word of the year, and I took a look at the words that form this trendy gold-ribbon winner.