In what can seem like a superheated environment of information and disinformation, with competing views more easily amplified through social media and an often pretty loose use of some serious words I thought it might be helpful to run a session in each Bulletin of words that can and are used inaccurately.
Readers of the Bulletin may have others that they want to share in future additions? To the editor please.
Example include woke, fascist, genocide, far right, socialist, communist, conspiracy , slander/ libel and this bulletins word – hoax.
A hoax “is a widely publicised falsehood created to deceive its audience with false and often astonishing information".
For many of the things that are labelled as hoax’s such as the reduction of the ozone layer, the melting of the ice sheets or man landing on the moon etc to be hoax’s you would have to conclude not that not only the tens of thousands of scientists and others involved have got it wrong but that they are deliberately and consistently spreading something they know to be untrue.
I guess that is possible, but given the numbers involved it’s hard to imagine that deliberate attempts to deceive could be kept secret for so long.