It's Worse Than Lies: There's No Word in the English Language for What Trump & Co. Are Doing
It’s Worse Than Lies: There’s No Word in the English Language for What Trump & Co. Are Doing
A lie is when you cover up or deflect. But proclaiming the opposite of the truth to be true is something else.
Michael Tomasky
Special Correspondent
In 2010, researchers from Harvard and Google put their heads together to determine that there are roughly 1,022,000 words in the English language. The Oxford English Dictionary lists around 600,000.
Either way, that’s a lot of words. But there isn’t a word in the English language for what Donald Trump and the Republicans are doing.
They are no longer merely lying. Lying is covering up the truth. Lying is, No, Mom, honest, I didn’t break Aunt Donna’s Hummel. Or: No, Your Honor, I did not bilk my investors out of $4 million and abscond to Grand Cayman.
What these people are doing goes way beyond that. It’s a direct nuclear assault on the truth. It’s not: I didn’t break the figurine. Instead, it’s:
Mom, not only did I not break it, but Susie broke it, and I painstakingly glued it back together after she did so, and the facts that a) Susie has been away at camp all this time and b) you’re looking at it there on the dining room table in 37 pieces are tricks, delusions—manifestations of a vast, fake-news conspiracy against me orchestrated by Susie and Aunt Donna. They’ve met together recently on more than one occasion, after all, and people are saying that Aunt Donna bought two boxes of Samoas and one box of Tagalongs from Susie; and that, dear Mother, is proof of the cabal!
For this, we do not have a word. In the entire English language. Chew on that for a minute.
= new reply since forum marked as read
your etymological thought process. Please share! TIA 
It's an interesting concept. I have lived through/survived having more than one family member who thinks and acts like this and i have never come up with a term or even a description of what it would look like in another context.
But I would argue that your word, which I like BTW, doesn't complete the scenario to be described.
My description, to add on to yours, would be more like a dog eating its fecal matter but then spitting it out all over everyone and then biting the victims for smelling bad. It would have to be a compound term consisting of more than one word to fully imply the whole concept.
Maybe this: Accusatory coprophagenous spewing... or something similar..? In this case it would have to be a verb phrase since it's something they are doing.
Thank you, Michael Tomasky!
