purity spiral
Word Rarity
Rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 3.46 in modern English
19
Scrabble Score
12
Letters
4
Syllables
9
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The situation in which members of an ideological group become increasingly zealous and intolerant, eventually turning on other members.
Example Sentences
- "[T]he American right has been caught in a purity spiral — a form of vicious circle in which successive elites compete among each other over who is the “true conservative.”"
- "This institutional slant has become most pronounced in universities, which have for several years gone through a 'purity spiral' as conservatives left the field, culminating in a sort of collective meltdown in the mid-2010s."
- "Many of TST's critics did frame the issue in terms of purity and contamination. In a debate on Facebook, one critic responded to Greaves's essay on purity spirals, "There's an old saying I like 'If there's a Nazi sitting at the table and 10 other people sitting there talking to him, you got a table with 11 nazis.'""