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WASHINGTON (WASHINGTON POST) - Friday was a productive vocabulary day in the United States of America.
The learning began in the morning, when former CIA director John O. Brennan tweeted at President Donald Trump: "Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey."
The insult was part of a raging feud between Trump and various members of the intelligence community, some of whom suspect the president's inner circle of committing federal crimes, and many of whom Trump says are out to destroy him.
Brennan's tweet proved quite popular with Trump's critics, even if not everyone totally understood it.
What, wondered the actor/director Zach Braff and many others, was a "kakistocracy?"
Kleptocracy means a government by thieves, and autocracy means government by one person. Both of those terms have been used liberally by Trump's critics in the last year or so, but kakistocracy ... was that like a government of cack, as in dung?
Actually, yeah, kind of.
Searches for the kakistocracy surged to the top of Merriam-Webster, arguably the hippest of the major dictionaries, which recently made "dumpster fire" an official English word.
So Merriam-Webster wrote a short explainer. Kakistos is Greek for "worse," so kakistocracy means government by the worst people.
Searches for the kakistocracy surged to the top of Merriam-Webster, arguably the hippest of the major dictionaries, which recently made "dumpster fire" an official English word.
So Merriam-Webster wrote a short explainer. Kakistos is Greek for "worse," so kakistocracy means government by the worst people.
The plural is kakistocracies, the dictionary added, in case the world one day ends up with two of them.
Paul Krugman rolled it out in the New York Times near the beginning of Trump's presidency: "An American kakistocracy - rule by the worst."
This isn't even the first time it's surged to on Merriam-Webster. The dictionary had to explain the word last summer, too, after MSNBC host Joy Reid used it, once again, to drag Trump.
This time, however, kakistocracy blew up the charts, with dictionary searches spiking nearly 14,000 per cent after Brennan's tweet.
The second most popular word of the day was "slimeball", which had been Trump's verbiage, in the tweet Brennan was replying to.
http://www.straitstimes.com/world/u...that-means-government-by-the-worst-just-broke
The learning began in the morning, when former CIA director John O. Brennan tweeted at President Donald Trump: "Your kakistocracy is collapsing after its lamentable journey."
The insult was part of a raging feud between Trump and various members of the intelligence community, some of whom suspect the president's inner circle of committing federal crimes, and many of whom Trump says are out to destroy him.
Brennan's tweet proved quite popular with Trump's critics, even if not everyone totally understood it.
What, wondered the actor/director Zach Braff and many others, was a "kakistocracy?"
Kleptocracy means a government by thieves, and autocracy means government by one person. Both of those terms have been used liberally by Trump's critics in the last year or so, but kakistocracy ... was that like a government of cack, as in dung?
Actually, yeah, kind of.
Searches for the kakistocracy surged to the top of Merriam-Webster, arguably the hippest of the major dictionaries, which recently made "dumpster fire" an official English word.
So Merriam-Webster wrote a short explainer. Kakistos is Greek for "worse," so kakistocracy means government by the worst people.
Searches for the kakistocracy surged to the top of Merriam-Webster, arguably the hippest of the major dictionaries, which recently made "dumpster fire" an official English word.
So Merriam-Webster wrote a short explainer. Kakistos is Greek for "worse," so kakistocracy means government by the worst people.
The plural is kakistocracies, the dictionary added, in case the world one day ends up with two of them.
Paul Krugman rolled it out in the New York Times near the beginning of Trump's presidency: "An American kakistocracy - rule by the worst."
This isn't even the first time it's surged to on Merriam-Webster. The dictionary had to explain the word last summer, too, after MSNBC host Joy Reid used it, once again, to drag Trump.
This time, however, kakistocracy blew up the charts, with dictionary searches spiking nearly 14,000 per cent after Brennan's tweet.
The second most popular word of the day was "slimeball", which had been Trump's verbiage, in the tweet Brennan was replying to.
http://www.straitstimes.com/world/u...that-means-government-by-the-worst-just-broke
