New American Dictionary: Security/Fear Edition, lexicon for warmongers

Canadian Institute for Infinitely Small Things

The last Canadian Institute for Infinitely Small Things action is both provocative and funny. They distributed in the culturally exciting city of Vancouver public libraries and bookstores around 40 copies of the New American Dictionary: Security/Fear Edition. Since long time do the communicative and communicated war has become a specific linguistic affair. This practice output and its being ‘official’ takes place, through a massive propaganda, into the suffocated scene of the ’embedded’ journalism. So, new idioms easily has entered the common use. Then we get to know the ‘Freedom Fries’, substitutive term for the ‘French Fries’, blamed because of being out of the war games. We also find brave neologisms, like for instance ‘Islamofascist’, which deviate the imagery towards well-known negative semantic patterns, fueling ignorance and racism. This is the new lexicon against which the guys from Vancouver got inspired, collecting a small thesaurus of these war words and spreading it around the city written culture repositories. Actually the initiative got smelled by Amazon (like it already happened with the hacking project Amazon Noir) who started to sell the dictionary from their own servers.

Tony Canonico