The following extract from "en.oxforddictionaries.com" comments about the meaning and origin of the expression "post-truth politics".
Post-truth Politics:
- After much discussion, debate, and research, the Oxford Dictionaries Word of the Year 2016 is post-truth – an adjective defined as ‘relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief’.
Post-truth:
- The compound word post-truth exemplifies an expansion in the meaning of the prefix post- that has become increasingly prominent in recent years. Rather than simply referring to the time after a specified situation or event – as in post-war or post-match – the prefix in post-truth has a meaning more like ‘belonging to a time in which the specified concept has become unimportant or irrelevant’. This nuance seems to have originated in the mid-20th century, in formations such as post-national (1945) and post-racial (1971).
The ODO and most main dictionaries define the meaning of the prefix post- as:
- After in time or order: ‘post-date’ ‘post-operative’
The usage of post- in "post-truth politics" appears to be convey a different nuance, it seems to suggest something opposite to real fact rather than post real facts. The examples given above, post-national post-racial still convey a notion of time in my opinion.
It is clearly a usage that has become idiomatic, but is it semantically correct? Are there other previous usage examples which are close in meaning to post- as used in post-truth?