contextomy means the act or practice of quoting somebody out of context, often to give a false impression of what they said. It carries an Arena rating of 1697, earned across 3 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, contextomy ranks #393 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #917 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #1,851 of 17,151 for The Improbable, #2,057 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words.
Why “contextomy” is a great word
The deliberate, often deceptive act of extracting a brief statement from its surrounding text or speech, thereby altering its intended meaning. From context (Latin contextus, “connection, coherence”) and -tomy (Greek -tomia, “cutting”), it was coined in the mid-1960s (1965–70). Unlike a simple misquotation, which may be an innocent error, or the abstract fallacy of quoting out of context, which names the logical misstep, contextomy specifies the practiced blade-work of the editor. It is the soundbite snipped from a meandering interview to manufacture outrage, the scripture verse excised from its chapter to serve a new dogma, the cold snip that severs a thought from the life that sustained it—a small, calculated violence against understanding.
Etymology
From context + -tomy.
noun
- The act or practice of quoting somebody out of context, often to give a false impression of what they said.e.g.“…saying that the Literary Gazette had committed the Chicago Tribune's habitual crime of contextomy against me.” — 1964, Milton Mayer, What can a man do?: A selection of his most challenging writings, page 33:
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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