sanewashing
Word Rarity
Very rare
Frequency: Zipf frequency 0.00 in modern English
18
Scrabble Score
11
Letters
2
Syllables
8
Unique Chars
Meaning
noun
The practice of restating someone’s rhetoric to render it more palatable or acceptable.
Uncountable
noun
The attempt to downplay the radicality of a person or idea to render it more palatable to the general public.
Uncountable
Example Sentences
- "This “sanewashing” of Trump’s statements isn’t just poor journalism; it’s a form of misinformation that poses a threat to democracy. By continually reframing Trump’s incoherent and often dangerous rhetoric as conventional political discourse, major news outlets are failing in their duty to inform the public and are instead providing cover for increasingly erratic behavior from a former—and potentially future—president."
- "There’s a hot new term doing the rounds among media critics: “sanewashing.” The term itself actually isn’t new, and it wasn’t born in media-criticism circles, per se; according to Urban Dictionary, it was coined in 2020 on a Reddit page for neoliberals..and meant “attempting to downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public.”"