[Ads-l] "sanewashing"

[Ben Zimmer]

The rhetorician Dale Carrico used "sanewashing" in an Oct. 2007 blog post
and has been credited by others with the coinage.

---
https://amormundi.blogspot.com/2007/10/sanewashing-superlativity-for-more.html
Dale Carrico, _Amor Mundi_ (blog), Oct. 26, 2007
"Sanewashing Superlativity (For a More Gentle Seduction)"
Far more amusing than his denials and efforts at organizational sanewashing
go, however, is his concluding admonishment of those -- oh, so few! --
transhumanists or Singularitarians who might be vulnerable to accusations
of Superlativity.
---
http://www.softmachines.org/wordpress/?p=356
Richard Jones, _Soft Machines_ (blog), Oct. 30, 2007
It’s good that Michael recognises the danger of the situation I identify,
but some other comments on his blog suggest to me that what he is doing
here is, in Carrico’s felicitous phrase, _sanewashing_ the transhumanist
and singularitarian movements with which he is associated.
---
https://thebaffler.com/salvos/everybody-freeze-pein
Corey Pein, "Everybody Freeze!", _The Baffler_, Mar. 2016
There was another important factor in the sane-washing[***] of cryonics.
[***] Credit goes to University of California-Berkeley lecturer in rhetoric
Dale Carrico for this coinage.
---

--bgz

On Fri, Sep 6, 2024 at 10:59 AM Nancy Friedman <wordworking at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Portraying something to appear more rational than it actually is (sane +
> whitewashing).
>
> "The Press Response to Trump's Word Salad Answer Is Peak Sanewashing"
> (Parker Molloy, September 6)
> https://www.readtpa.com/p/the-press-response-to-trumps-word
>
> "From Rambling to Rational: The Media's Trump Sanewashing Problem"
> (Parker Molloy, The New Republic, September 4)
>
> https://www.yahoo.com/news/rambling-rational-media-trump-sanewashing-100000571.html
>
> Appeared in 2022 in reference to a Reddit /r/antiwork discussion:
>
> https://tracingwoodgrains.medium.com/r-antiwork-a-tragedy-of-sanewashing-and-social-gentrification-56298af1c1a7
>
> Urban Dictionary, April 22, 2022:
> https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=sanewashing
>
> I wrote earlier this year about another novel -washing coinage,
> "smallwashing," and included links to other -washing compounds:
> https://fritinancy.substack.com/p/word-of-the-week-smallwashing
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org