Post by benson on Feb 15, 2022 9:38:28 GMT
How ‘cultural MARXISM’ and ‘critical race theory’ became dangerously misunderstood | The Grammaria
Congratulations, red-scaredy-cats! You won the dictionary this week. I hope you’re happy.
The Oxford English Dictionary has just added cultural MARXISM to its records. And that’s a big victory for a lot of people who fearmonger about cultural MARXISM but probably don’t even understand what it is. Not because they can now look up the term — rather, the term’s addition to the dictionary means it has gained enough cultural currency that it warrants a definition. People who are worried about cultural MARXISM washing over vulnerable, patriotic capitalists talked about it enough that dictionary editors finally took notice.
What is cultural MARXISM, and why now, more than 80 years after the term first appeared in print?
The OED’s primary definition is worth reading in full: “Used depreciatively, chiefly among right-wing commentators: a political agenda advocating radical social reform, said to be promoted within western cultural institutions by liberal or left-wing ideologues intent on eroding traditional social values and imposing a dogmatic form of progressivism on society. Later also more generally: a perceived left-wing bias in social or cultural institutions, characterized as doctrinaire and pernicious.”
The last few years have seen a similar journey for critical race theory, a once-obscure academic topic that has become an accelerant at every small-town school board meeting in America. That term isn’t even in the OED … yet.
Dictionaries often don’t agree when a word warrants its own entry. cultural MARXISM is in the OED but not Merriam-Webster’s; critical race theory is in Merriam-Webster’s but not the OED. Dictionary.com, which relies primarily on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, added critical race theory just last year, but it doesn’t have cultural MARXISM. (No lexicographers take Dictionary.com seriously — it’s like the Applebee’s of dictionaries — but it’s popular, so its new inclusion of CRT is newsworthy.)
www.inquirer.com/opinion/cultural-marxism-critical-race-theory-language-20220104.html
Congratulations, red-scaredy-cats! You won the dictionary this week. I hope you’re happy.
The Oxford English Dictionary has just added cultural MARXISM to its records. And that’s a big victory for a lot of people who fearmonger about cultural MARXISM but probably don’t even understand what it is. Not because they can now look up the term — rather, the term’s addition to the dictionary means it has gained enough cultural currency that it warrants a definition. People who are worried about cultural MARXISM washing over vulnerable, patriotic capitalists talked about it enough that dictionary editors finally took notice.
What is cultural MARXISM, and why now, more than 80 years after the term first appeared in print?
The OED’s primary definition is worth reading in full: “Used depreciatively, chiefly among right-wing commentators: a political agenda advocating radical social reform, said to be promoted within western cultural institutions by liberal or left-wing ideologues intent on eroding traditional social values and imposing a dogmatic form of progressivism on society. Later also more generally: a perceived left-wing bias in social or cultural institutions, characterized as doctrinaire and pernicious.”
The last few years have seen a similar journey for critical race theory, a once-obscure academic topic that has become an accelerant at every small-town school board meeting in America. That term isn’t even in the OED … yet.
Dictionaries often don’t agree when a word warrants its own entry. cultural MARXISM is in the OED but not Merriam-Webster’s; critical race theory is in Merriam-Webster’s but not the OED. Dictionary.com, which relies primarily on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, added critical race theory just last year, but it doesn’t have cultural MARXISM. (No lexicographers take Dictionary.com seriously — it’s like the Applebee’s of dictionaries — but it’s popular, so its new inclusion of CRT is newsworthy.)
www.inquirer.com/opinion/cultural-marxism-critical-race-theory-language-20220104.html