Lee Jussim is the author of The Orwelexicon, a blog post so funny that it was banned by Psychology Today. Within only 12 hours it had been viewed more than 1000 times (which is very popular for a Psychology article) but as it was a humourous post it is not surprising that it was taken down as Psychology Today is a serious site.
First off we need a definition of the term Orwelexicon. It means “twisting the meaning of words in order to advance a political or policy agenda.”
It seems that Jussim was inspired to create the Orwelexicon after reading a serious lexicon published in a major biomedical journal with the headline “Lexicon for Gender Bias in Academia and Medicine.” In this serious article, they made the case that “mansplaining” was just the “tip of the iceberg” and they created some neologisms of their own including:
- Himpediment: Man who stands in the way of progress of women.
- Misteria: Irrational fear that advancing women means catastrophic lack of opportunity for men.
Such silliness posing as serious science was begging to be mocked so for your delectation here is a selection of some of Jussim’s not so serious definitions for your enjoyment.
The terms below are neologisms which are new words that Jussim believes “capture the tone and substance of much discourse, rhetoric, dysfunction, and bias in academia and psychology.” They humorously capture both the biases and the Orwellian disingenuousness that pervades academia today.
Adminomania: A delusion that increased administrative and bureaucratic intrusions into people’s lives will actually improve something, fueled primarily by a pervasive blindness to unintended negative side effects. See especially the tendency for administrative organs to erode due process protections (Title IX) and punish people for infractions they did not actually commit or for which incriminating evidence is ambiguous at best.
Alliesheimers disease: A memory loss condition whereby one conveniently forgets one’s widely espoused principles of equity and inclusion when providing “allyship” to those on your side by attempting to stigmatize, punish, or ostracize those on the other side.
Athletic gynocide: The elimination from sports competitions of people identified at birth by doctors or other adults as female because they cannot successfully compete with people identified at birth by doctors or other adults as males but who identify as females.
Bias bias: A bias for seeing biases, often manifesting as either claiming bias when none exists, exaggerating biases that do exist, or overgeneralizing to large swaths of life from studies finding bias in some narrow or specific context.
Binaryphobia: Fear that some things really are binary.
Biomindophobia: Fear that biology influences the mind.
Blancofemophobia: Prejudice against white women, as exemplified by dismissing the beliefs, attitudes, or behaviours of white women with phrases such as, “White women white womening.” Go here for a real world example.
Brexistential fear: An irrational fear that Brexit will lead to the end of the world as we know it.
Brophobia: Fear of men having a conversation among themselves, especially on social media where there are no barriers to anyone participating, regardless of demographic identity.
Cancelophobia: Fear of being cancelled, usually followed by self-censorship.
Cathy Newmanism: Those wracked by this intellectually debilitating condition are incapable of responding to others’ actual statements. You can tell you have this condition if, instead of responding to an actual statement, you rephrase it in such a manner as to accuse the person you are interacting with of a far more extreme & even ridiculous claim than they actually made. You then react with incredulity and outrage that the person you are talking with made such a ridiculous claim that they never made but you made for them. “So what you are really saying is [followed by a ridiculous caricaturization].” Made famous by this interview of Jordan Peterson by Cathy Newman. I was Cathy Newmaned by Susan Fiske before Cathy Newmanism was a thing, as I described here.[…]
medium.com/@leej12255/an-orwelexicon-for-bias-and-dysfunction-in-academia-neologisms-for-the-insufficiently-woke-
If you enjoyed this BFD article please consider sharing it with your friends.
