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Let's all make 'trump' a dirty word and restore the Old English term 'trumpery' to modern vernacular usage
By Dave Lindorff
Trump is gone, but not forgotten.
The damage he's done, the 25,000 or more lies he spewed out that led so many people to begin living in an alternative fact-free universe for the last five years, will stay with us for years unless his legacy is trashed and his millions of deluded followers wake up to the reality of his mendaciousness, narcicism, corruption and selfishness.
Fortunately ex-President Trump has provided us with the very word we need to accomplish this: his own surname!
It turns out the surname Trump that his German grandpa Fred Drumpf chose to provide at the Ellis Island immigration desk dates back to the Old English term trumpery. Still occasionally used, the Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines it as meaning "worthless nonsense" and traces its etymology to the Old Scot-English noun trompery meaning "deceit" and the Old French verb tromper meaning "to deceive."
Sound about right?
The word even makes a cameo in Shakespeare's The Tempest when the Bard has sorcerer Prospero instruct his faery servant Ariel:
"The trumpery in my house, go bring it hither
For stale [bait] to catch these thieves."
I've been thinking over the last few months of the presidential interegnum about all the trumpery (fallacious bunkum) emanating from the White House in Trump's desperate and increasingly comical effort to undermine confidence in the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential election, which Joe Biden won by over 7 million votes, a margin of 4% while racking up 306 Electors -- 36 more than needed to win the Electoral College.
My proposal is that going forward we all adopt trump as an obscene multi-purpose epithet for anyone engaging in fraud, evasion, subterfuge, and popularize trumpery to describe what they are spewing. Given the word's venerable linguistic roots, we're halfway there already!"
For the rest of this article by Dave Lindorff in ThisCantBeHappening!, the uncompromised, collectively run, six-time Project Censored Award-winning online news site, please go to: https://thiscantbehappening.net/5559-2/
