Hyperpartisanship: A Barbarous Term for a Barbarous Age
- sofiapbaker
- Dec 21, 2020
- 1 min read
I don’t find the word “hyperpartisanship” in any dictionary. It’s not in the Oxford English Dictionary (last updated in 2015) or even in the online Merriam-Webster Unabridged, usually nimbler with neologisms. But dictionaries, as usual, lag behind usage. A Nexis-Uni search finds the earliest attested use of the term in 1992, and an explosion in its use after 2000. Given the state of U.S. politics since 2000 that is not surprising. Yet one is tempted also to correlate the monstrous coinage with the decline in knowledge of languages other than English among journalists and public intellectuals. The word is technically a barbarism, half Greek and half Italian. “Hyper-” is a Greek prefix. “Partisan” is from partigiano, first attested in the 15th century, via the French partisan, first attested in the 17th; both derive from partes, the Latin for political factions. “Superpartisanship” would have been a less barbarous coinage but also less pretentious, and therefore less attractive to the half-educated. “Hyperstasis” would be a sound coinage but incomprehensible as well as pretentious. But let there be barbarous names for barbarous things…