Post-truth crowned Word of the Year 2016

With 2016 being one of the sensational years in living political memory, post-truth has skyrocketed in popularity as a result of a “growing distrust of facts,” according to Casper Grathwohl, President of Oxford Dictionaries.

Grathwohl believes post-truth has the potential of becoming “one of the defining words of our time.”

Defined by the Oxford Dictionary as relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief, post-truth and the shortlist were chosen to reflect the social, cultural, political, economic, and technological trends and events that have been a part of 2016.

Highly charged politics

‘It’s not surprising that our choice reflects a year dominated by highly-charged political and social discourse,’ Grathwohl explains.

‘Fuelled by the rise of social media as a news source and a growing distrust of facts offered up by the establishment, post-truth as a concept has been finding its linguistic footing for some time.’

Most recently Facebook has been slammed for allowing fake news to appear on the social media website.

“We first saw the frequency really spike this year in June with buzz over the Brexit vote and again in July when Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination,” Grathwohl explains.