In the last couple-three weeks, I’ve seen the term sanewashing (sometimes hyphenated) used to discuss people interpreting the speeches of a certain politician.† Does anyone know who invented/first used this term?
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† Please, no political discussion about the politician in question. There’re plenty of other threads for that.
I’ve been seeing the term on fark.com for a while. I wouldn’t be surprised if it originated there. In case you’re not aware, fark.com is a news aggregation site where people post news links and make comments on them. Lots of people made comments about how the media would sanitize Trump’s blather to be more reasonable. Eventually, I saw people starting to use the term sanewashing in the comments, and then later in use the term in the descriptions of the news articles on the site.
Reddit might be another possibility for the origin of the term. I don’t read political chat there, so I’m not sure about that. But it has a similar audience as fark.com, so I could see them coming up with it as well.
Well, that was a lot of response…
OK, so I guess no one has any idea except @filmore. So I’m going to hijack my own thread (that’s allowed, isn’t it?) and ask
What are the different ways the -wash suffix has been used?
It originated as whitewash, meaning to hide unpleasant details as if under a coat of paint. I’ve also seen greenwash and sportswash. Now we have sanewash. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen others, but they don’t come to mind at the moment.
I wanted to call it sane-itizing, but nobody listens to me.
Brainwash. Plenty of other words where -wash means a coating or cleaning substance like the the noun whitewash.
But the meaning of a literal coating is not what I’m looking for. Rather I’m looking for the metaphorical coating, as in the examples I gave. Brainwash is metaphorical, but in a different sense, so I guess I’ll take it.
Yeah, it might be splitting hairs, but I think brainwashing implies a permeation of the brain by prolonged or aggressive immersion. Like you’ve had your brain washed and rinsed and all the normal stuff has been drained away.
Whitewashing, greenwashing, etc seem to imply a superficial coating or covering of something, concealing its true and contrary nature that is still there.
So, without the sanewashing it would just remain hogwash?
I’ve seen a claim*–I don’t know how accurate–that it originated with this Reddit post from 2020.
*On Twitter, the author of said post says:
I invented the term “sanewashing”.
There’s “pinkwash”.
Used by far-left gay/lesbian groups when they criticize Israel.
(In Gaza being gay is totally unacceptable socially, is illegal, and can get you killed. Israel recognizes full gay rights. So when somebody from the “Queers for Palestine” is accused of being hypocritical, they scream “pinkwashing”.)
Come again? I understand “pinkwashing” to be when corporations attempt to pander to LGBT consumers by putting rainbows in their logos during June or paying lip service to gay rights when they have a history or internal culture of treating gay employees badly.
That actually looks quite likely. I haven’t read the entire thing, but the fact that an extensive explanation of the term is made contributes to that likelihood. Also, interesting is that it wasn’t about the speeches the term is usually used for today. In fact, I’ve never before seen the term used for anything else but explanations of
those speeches.
It’s also possible that it was invented multiple times, by multiple people, as an extension of words like “greenwashing”.
Yes.
Several attribute its introduction to a wider audience (exactly a month ago), in the current context of he-whom-the-OP-has-deemed-shall-remain-nameless, to Patrick Molloy of The New Republic, but in a quick search I haven’t found much to corroborate that:
If you name him, he’ll show up and give a speech that someone will have to sanewash for us to understand.
Hah!!
I don’t know who invented the word “sanewashing”, but I really feel that it should be the winner of “Word of the Year” prize.
It’s a pretty important accomplishment: Adding a new word to the English language , to express a new concept which was previously unknown but is a now necessary to describe an important aspect of our society.
I don’t know exactly how the automatic thread tagging works, but if you name him it’s likely the thread gets tagged with his name. And as the OP said, we’ve got enough of those already.
I’d think that either brainwash or whitewash were the first metaphorical uses of -wash. Brainwash is based on a Chinese phrase something like wash brain and meaning something like cleaning the brain of someone’s idea of unclean thoughts. Whitewash is more along the lines of a coating to cover up undesirable language. You could follow along the lines of whitewash with any color. The sense of brainwash is rather unique to in my limited scope of wordery.
I may be entirely wrong, but my perception is that “brainwashing” dates from the experience of Western prisoners of war in the Korean War (cf. The Manchurian Candidate). I don’t know what sort of concept was used for the process by which - say - Stalin’s show trial victims so seemingly willingly professed their guilt, or Nazi adherents parrotted assorted lies from the leadership.