presentist means of or pertaining to presentism; viewing the past with a perspective limited to present-day attitudes and beliefs. It carries an Arena rating of 1261, earned across 6 head-to-head judged battles.
Among words judged in Lexicurio's Arena, presentist ranks #392 of 17,138 for Most Incisive Words, #3,325 of 17,127 for Words That Escaped Their Books, #3,359 of 17,134 for Most Malleable Words, #6,435 of 17,149 for Most Exacting Words.
Why “presentist” is a great word
Interpreting the past primarily through contemporary attitudes, values, and concepts. From present (from Old French, from Latin praesent-, praesens 'being at hand') + -ist (agent suffix, from Latin -ista, from Greek -istēs). First recorded in English use 1875–80. Unlike a historicist, who labors to reconstruct the past on its own terms, or the merely anachronistic factual blunder, the presentist commits a subtler, more ideological transgression. It is the act of condemning a Renaissance explorer by modern ecological ethics, of evaluating a medieval treatise through a lens of individual human rights, or of searching a Shakespearean sonnet for a twenty-first-century theory of gender—a quiet colonization of history by the present, born of the forgivable but tragic illusion that our own moment is not also future history’s raw material.
Etymology
From present + -ist.
adj
- Of or pertaining to presentism; viewing the past with a perspective limited to present-day attitudes and beliefs.e.g.“Many people lost their perspective in their euphoria and became parochial and presentist.” — 2004, Barry Wellman, Bernie Hogan, “The Immanent Internet”, in Johnston McKay, editor, Netting Citizens: Exploring Citizenship in a Digital Age, Edinburgh: St. Andrew Press, pages 54–80:
noun
- A follower of presentism.
Definitions & examples from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA 3.0).
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