My Take | Good luck with the new political party, Joshua, but shame about the name
First we had Scholarism, now we have Demosisto – what are our young wannabe politicians thinking?
In keeping with their tradition of picking the worst possible name for themselves, the young activists who previously formed Scholarism have now launched a political party called Demosisto.
Way back then, I thought “scholarism” was a neologism. No doubt its co-founder Joshua Wong Chi-fung, then a secondary school student, thought so too.
It’s “scholar” followed by “ism”, something like a system of thought or belief that is scholarly and thoughtful, perhaps?
The word turned out to be just an ugly word that fell into disuse after the late 1980s. A 1989 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary defines it as “pedantic learning”. An earlier edition even offers a helpful example: the word means pedantic methods bordering on plagiarism to advance one’s academic career.
Some recent editions no longer consider “scholarism” a proper word, recommending instead the word scholastic.
If there is one good thing about Scholarism being disbanded, it is that English writers can now put this non-word out of its misery.
