Linguist calls for help to build glossary of Brexit terms and of ‘toxic terminology of populism’

From snowflakes to Spartans and saboteurs to surrender, the vocabulary of Brexit is growing so fast and proving so slippery that the public risks losing track of what people are talking about, a leading language professor has said.

With the prime minister revelling in the use of military metaphors such as “surrender” to deride parliament’s opposition to a hard Brexit and Church of England bishops denouncing the “unacceptable” tone of political debate, Tony Thorne, a visiting linguistics consultant at King’s College London, is calling for help to build a public glossary of Brexitspeak and “the toxic terminology of populism”.

He has already gathered more than 200 terms that chart how political language has bloomed in recent years to close what academics call “lexical gaps”, as older terms were found wanting to describe a shattered political landscape, creating an atmosphere of fear, uncertainty and doubt, or FUD.

“People ought to familiarise themselves otherwise they risk being bamboozled and duped,” says Thorne, a specialist in slang and jargon who also advises the police and courts on gang communication. “For more than a year I have been tracking the language of Brexit and populism we have developed on social media and in the mainstream media to talk about these things. A lot of the language is designed to trigger [emotions] rather than elucidate.”

Q&A What is a customs union? Show Hide A customs union means that countries agree to apply no or very low tariffs to goods sold between them, and to collectively apply the same tariffs to imported goods from the rest of the world. International trade deals are then negotiated by the bloc as a whole. For the EU, this means deals are negotiated by by Brussels, although individual member state governments agree the mandate and approve the final deal. The EU has trade deals covering 69 countries, including Canada and South Korea, which the UK has been attempting to roll over into post-Brexit bilateral agreements. Proponents of an independent UK trade policy outside the EU customs union say Britain must forge its own deals if it is to take advantage of the world’s fastest-growing economies. However they have never explained why Germany manages to export more than three times the value in goods to China than Britain does, while also being in the EU customs union. Jennifer Rankin

In the same way as business language fell in line with increasingly complex corporate practices in the 80s and 90s, and the vocabulary around technology flowered alongside online culture in the 00s, there has been an eruption in English political coinages in the years after the Brexit vote, says Thorne.

The vocabulary is often “skunked” or twisted, so it becomes hard to pin down, sometimes usefully so for its users. On the left, “centrist dad”, something many people call themselves, can also be a pejorative term; “magic grandpa” is used to describe Jeremy Corbyn by both fans and detractors; and a “normie” is someone who can be found on both the left and the right, who wrongly accepts social standards and mainstream media.

The right tends to have the wider lexicon, says Thorne. Remain supporters are variously identified by opponents as “anywheres” and “remainiacs” engaged in ““remoanathons”. There are dozens of pejorative nouns including “soyboy”, “libtard”, “snowflake”, “crybaby”, “elite” and “establishment”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Boris Johnson has revelled in using military metaphors such as ‘surrender’ to deride parliamentary opposition to no deal. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images

Rarely used terms have gained increasing currency to describe new tactics of argument, Thorne says. There is “whataboutery” (rebutting an attack only by accusing an opponent of hypocrisy), “bothsidesism” (false balance in political debate) and “astroturfing” (pretending a campaign has grassroots support).

Boris Johnson has refused to back down over his use of military metaphors, including “surrender”. He jokingly asked a crowd at the Conservative party conference this week: “Am I fighting a losing battle to use these military metaphors? Or should I stick to my guns?”

Last month Johnson described as “humbug” calls from Labour MPs to moderate his language in the light of the murder of their colleague Jo Cox in 2016, and has been criticised for talking of “a terrible kind of collaboration” between opponents of Brexit and EU states.

Q&A Brexit phrasebook: what are citizens' rights? Show Hide Citizens’ rights are the rights and protections offered to all EU citizens, including free movement and residence, equal treatment and a wide range of other rights under EU law regarding work, education, social security and health. They are held by some 3.5 million citizens from other member states in the UK and about 1.2 million British nationals on the continent, and are a key part of the negotiations that are taking Britain out of Europe. Read more on citizens' rights

More from the Brexit phrasebook

All the main UK political parties this week signed a pledge to use moderate language. It urged leaders to “weigh their words carefully, bearing in mind that there are stark divisions across the country on Brexit”.

“The right in the UK has only recently fired up the war metaphors, ramping up the notion of violent conflict and the associated notion already used against the EU of uniting against an ‘enemy’,” says Thorne. “Now it’s a little different – the enemy is here at home and is anyone who disagrees. The left’s vocabulary is more varied mixing jokey derision – melt [moderates], unicorn [impossible dream] – with more savage descriptions such as pathocracy [leadership by people with personality disorders].”

Thorne has identified confusing “semantic clustering” around contentious words such as “collusion”, which has been used on both sides of the debate. Downing Street described the drafting of the Benn act opposing a no-deal Brexit as collusion, while the same term was used to allege that Johnson’s backers may profit financially from Britain crashing out of the EU.

Given it is hard to keep up, some observers have suggested the new semantic flowering suggests politics is becoming untethered from reality.

Steve Buckledee, the author of The Language of Brexit, a book about the language of the referendum campaign, says the elaborate and codified nature of the language being used more than three years on could be evidence that most of the population has tuned out.

“Perhaps Joe Public is fed up with it all,” he says. “And the people who are still interested are having a private conversation among themselves which only they understand.”

Glossary

Airfix patriotism – caricatured vision of our heroic past based on war comics and model aeroplanes.

Cosmopolitan – dogwhistle term for internationally influential Jewish person (eg George Soros).

Quitlings – whining supporters of Brexit.

Replacement theory – racist idea that a white population is being replaced by people of other ethnic groups.

Attitudinarianism – assuming a pose or belief for effect.

Cancel culture – mass boycotts of celebrities who voice divergent opinions.

Finger-sniffer – someone who revels in toxic behaviour.

King Baby – an adult who requires the self-centred gratification of an infant. Applied by critics to Donald Trump and Boris Johnson.

Hi-vis Nazis – abusive term for rightwing Brexiters, aping French gilets jaunes (yellow vest) movement.