If you've read this blog for any amount of time, you know that I truly enjoy words. Selecting the right word can add color to a description and clarity to a position, and in some cases both.
Over the past four years, my vocabulary has expanded into topics and areas that I would never have considered part of life in the United States, let alone any vernacular. Sure, I'd heard some of these words from time to time, but infrequently, such that I had no true familiarity with how they would be used to describe or identify people, places or events.
Allow me to give you a taste of what I've been coerced into learning. In some sense of misplaced fairness, I've listed these in alpha order.
Authoritarian - of, relating to, or favoring a concentration of power in leader or an elite not constitutionally responsible to the people
Antithetical - being in direct and unequivocal opposition
Autocrat - a person (such as a monarch) ruling with unlimited power
Bigot - a person who obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her own opinions and prejudices
Despot - a ruler with absolute power and authority; a person exercising absolute power in a brutal or oppressive way
Disenfranchise - to deprive of a franchise, of a legal right, or of some privilege or immunity; especially: to deprive of the right to vote
Fascism - a political philosophy, movement, or regime that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forceable suppression of opposition; a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
Ineptitude - generally incompetent : bungling
Hyperbolic - of or relating to, or marked by language that exaggerates or overstates the truth
Hypocrisy - a feigning to be what one is not or to believe what one does not; behavior that contradicts what one claims to believe or feel
Illiberal - not broad-minded: bigoted; oppose to liberalism
Imbecile - a person affected with moderate intellectual disability
Narcissistic - extremely self-centered with an exaggerated sense of self-importance : marked by or characteristic of excessive admiration of or infatuation with oneself
Nepotism - favoritism (as in appointment to a job) based on kinship
Misogyny - a hatred of women
Plutocracy - government by the wealthy
Scientifically illiterate - showing or marked by a lack of acquaintance with the fundamentals of a particular field of knowledge, in this case science
Sycophant - a servile self-seeking flatterer
Totalitarian - of or relating to centralized control by an autocratic leader or hierarchy; Authoritarian, Dictatorial, Despotic
Xenophobia - fear and hatred of strangers or foreigners or of anything that is strange or foreign
I love learning and always have. I only wish learning this vocabulary had not been forced on me over the past several years, just so I could understand the news.