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It has always been hard to keep up with our ever-expanding and evolving language. It’s a truism that as soon as any brand new dictionary is published, it is already to some degree outdated. Everything new under the sun must have its own word, and in an age of computer technology and the wild expansion of knowledge, new words pop up all the time.
Of these, there are a few that I find troublesome, as they are either not faithful to what they are supposed to mean, or are invented for purely ideological or rhetorical purposes. They are more like jargon, or argot, used by a small subset of society, instead of being for all speakers.
I’m referring to the various neologisms that float out of academia, launched from the shipyards of feminist and assorted sexuality studies. Some of them are tiny, like “cis.” Others almost have the bulk of German nouns, like this one I recently encountered: “cisheteropatriarchal” (the meaning of which I was unwilling to take the time to decipher).