Use of the term "Witch Hunt"

In My Humble Opinion
21

I think you are confusing something here. A word doesn’t change meaning just because someone is lying about something. If I say black but the truth is white, that doesn’t mean that black now means white. It just means I’m mistaken or lying. If someone says that they are the victim of a witch hunt but they are actually guilty of a real crime, as charged, that doesn’t mean that witch hunt now means an investigation into someone who is actually guilty, it just means they are mistaken or lying.

Trump is using witch hunt to mean precisely what it meant before. He’s just - at least in my view - mistaken or lying about whether he is the victim of a witch hunt.

22

You’re arguing how words should work. I’m explicating how words do work.

Many people don’t like the fact that words slip their boundaries and act in ways unbecoming. Words don’t care and keep on mutating before our eyes. You can either acknowledge that truth or be left in the dustbin of history.

23

No not at all. I am not by an means a prescriptivist. I think that perhaps in your enthusiasm for lecturing people on the follies of prescriptivism, you are overlooking the point. Trump is not using witch hunt in a way that is different to that which it has been used before. He is using it to mean precisely what it has always meant.

Surely you are not saying that when Trump says “I am the victim of a witch hunt” he is using the term “witch hunt” to mean “a well founded investigation into a crime of which I am guilty”?

24

Exactly. And he’s not using ‘fake news’ in a different way either, he’s just claiming that the news he doesn’t like isn’t true.

If as a result people started ironically using ‘fake news’ to mean real news, then that would be a different meaning of the word. But just disagreeing over whether something is really a witch hunt or not does not change the meaning.

25

Of these I think only ‘woke’ is used with different meanings by different people. People accuse different news items of being fake, but whether correct or not, they always mean it’s not true. And politically incorrect always means saying something that is regarded as unacceptable by certain people. The disagreement is on whether this is a good thing or not. But woke really does mean something nearly opposite depending on who says it.

26

Going to have to respectfully disagree here. The whole point, I think, of the OP’s post is not whether “witch hunt” means a campaign against an innocent person, or a guilty person; I think everyone agrees it means a campaign against innocence, and so in that sense, Trump is misusing it, because he’s lying about being innocent.

What’s up for debate is whether a “witch hunt” can be against one person, and whether it merely means a campaign someone innocent, or if it is something more specific.

27

Correct. And I also made a request not to argue about Trump, and stick to the use of the phrase.

28

Hmm… I had a whole post about why I agreed with @Princhester, but now I’m going back to the OP and considering the “individual” v. “group” aspect.

I have never considered that a “witch hunt” needed some unknown shadowy group of individuals, like McCarthyism (although it certainly could be). I imagined it could also apply to that crazy lady that lives in the woods that we all kind of don’t like, or that heretical old widow that keeps saying that Jesus can’t cure the plague, or any trouble-maker we don’t like and want to get rid of. So we get some fake evidence, whip the crowd up about the devil, and then execute her.

So, I think I still agree with @Princhester. You can have a witch hunt against a single known person. The key is that you are attacking them for reasons based on fear and prejudice, or for personal aggrandizement, and making up evidence about crimes that don’t even exist.

But I do agree that the usage is a bit off, and not just because Trump is so obviously guilty of many crimes. I think what he really means is more like “fishing expedition”, or the more mundane “persecution”, where the legal authorities go over your entire life with a fine-toothed comb to find any minor transgression to throw the book at you. So he’s conflating the “hunt” part of “witch hunt” with the “hunt for evidence” in a “fishing expedition”. In a “witch hunt” you aren’t hunting for evidence because you’re going to make that part up.

And, not to rely too much on authority, the dictionaries I’m looking at seem to include both meanings - a search for a witch from some group of people or a targeted campaign against an individual for personal or political reasons.

29

Responding to several people generally.

Look at the recent history of the term “witch hunt.” Starting with Google ngrams, I searched hits it gave from 2000-2017, in which the term appears predominantly in books about Salem or other historical witches. The few modern examples include the Catholic priesthood, accusations of satanic preying on children, and McCarthyism.

In 2018, though, you start seeing overtly political, usually but not always right-wing, books on the list. The Russia Hoax: The Illicit Scheme to Clear Hillary Clinton and Frame Donald Trump. Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends. The Deep State: How an Army of Bureaucrats Protected Barack Obama and Is Working to Destroy the Trump Agenda. Witch Hunt Or Justice?: Accusations Against Public Figures. Witch Hunt: The Story of the Greatest Mass Delusion in American Political History. Exonerated: The Failed Takedown of President Donald Trump by the Swamp. Power Grab: The Liberal Scheme to Undermine Trump, the GOP, and Our Republic. Radicals, Resistance, and Revenge: The Left’s Plot to Remake America. Triggered: How the Left Thrives on Hate and Wants to Silence Us. Silent No More: How I Became a Political Prisoner of Mueller’s “Witch Hunt”.

Any dictionary editor would look at this sudden profusion and start writing a new secondary meaning for the term. The earlier uses, even for the McCarthy era, were not overtly political. These are or are examining the new political usage. It’s impossible to keep Trump out of this; nothing can be more obvious that his constant use of the term to apply to his proclaimed innocence from crimes is driving the similar use of the term by others on the right. The personalized titles also show that the term is being used by aggrieved individuals, not just a class of persons. This is new, and interesting, and distinct from earlier usages even if it manifestly is descended from them.

It’s a perfect capsulized version of how dictionaries update themselves that will probably go into every future book on dictionaries. It’s only prescriptivism when you remember that prescriptivism and modern dictionary definitions are synonymous.

As a footnote, “fake news” hardly appears at all in ngrams before 2014. Then it zooms upward. But in 2007, Howard Kurtz’s book on the turmoil on the evening network news shows, Reality Show, had a chapter titled “Fake News.” It was all about Jon Stewart and The Daily Show. Obviously, then, fake news meant satirical or comic takes on the news rather than the current meaning of any real news that makes us look bad. That’s a huge flip, far larger than the nuances of “witch hunt.”

30

On the subject of the usage of “witchhunt” to mean an investigation into an individual as opposed to a group (which to be fair to Peter Morris is the precise subject of his OP) I do agree there has been a broadening in the meaning of the word in this respect.

Exapno, you are drawing a distinction without a significant difference. Everything is politics. Do you think the Salem witch trials or McCarthyism weren’t political? Of course they were. Salem was about local politics. McCarthyism was about US federal politics. The only real distinction you are pointing to is to an uptake in the use of the term, falsely, by the right wing.

“Black” doesn’t change meaning just because I have started using it when I didn’t use it before. And “black” doesn’t mean white just because I keep lying and telling people that things are black when they are actually white. I’m using the term “black” to try to cause people to think objects are black. In other words I’m using the word “black” to mean “black” it’s just that I’m a liar. It doesn’t mean that “black” now means “white”.

I can see that usage of the term falsely might cause the meaning of the term to flip, i.e. to mean “a justified investigation that the subjects of the investigation (wrongly) consider to be unjustified” I don’t think we are at that point yet – else Trump and others would stop using it.

31

Don’t forget, there were once literal witch hunts. They existed at Salem, Mass, and in Europe, and a few other times and places in what would become the US.

I think there’s a legitimate argument that if a modern situation is not analogous to a literal witch hunt from history, then it is not a witch hunt, regardless of whether someone has called it that.

32

The term has moved on from there a long time ago.

33

This I fully agree with.

34

It seems readily apparent that this was the original sense of the term at least through its use in the 1950s - not only are there no witches in Salem, witches don’t really exist anywhere; you’re “hunting” something fictional. It may have expanded since then but the whole idea of, e.g., calling McCarthyism a “witch hunt” was to deny that even the basic accusations (of Communist spying in the U.S.) were true and strongly imply that there were no legitimate targets whatsoever.

35

So, because some people use the term “crucify” figuratively, and some people misuse it, or use it mendaciously, it no longer retains the literal means of being hung up on a cross-shaped structure to die?

36

I think that’s it, to me. It’s a claim that the accusation is not only wrong, but of something that isn’t even possible.

– Admittedly, the term may simply be losing most of its earlier meaning, and starting to mean only ‘somebody’s being accused of something and the person saying ‘witch hunt’ doesn’t like it!’

By their meaning of witch, it was flat out impossible. They weren’t talking about members of another religion, they were talking about people who had literally made a pact with the Christian Devil, and who had acquired supernatural powers by doing so.

Agreeing with this.

37

That’s not how language works at all.

If you insist that crucify must have only one literal meaning then you must be surprised at the lack of tortured corpses hanging around the landscape, given the frequency of the modern, figurative usage. If you’re not surprised, then surprise! you’ve already thoroughly assimilated the additional meaning and your objection is meaningless.

38

Belief in magic and sorcery were pervasive in early modern Europe though I certainly won’t vouch for the efficacy of magical thinking or rituals. There were certainly individuals in Scotland who were more than happy to brew magical potions, create amulets, or perform rituals designed to bring about a desired effect for payment from their client. Those people were real and they were in violation of the law.