Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles.
One app.

Start reading

Get all your news in one place.

100’s of premium titles. One news app.

Start reading

Tribune News Service

Politics

Nelson Oliveira

'Logorrhea,' 'shush,' 's�tshow' among top dictionary searches after trashy presidential debate

President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden participate in the first presidential debate at the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University, on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020, in Cleveland. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca Press/TNS)

Logorrhea?

Think of it as a more elegant way to describe "diarrhea of the mouth."

That's also how MSNBC anchor Rachel Maddow described President Trump's out-of-control behavior in his first debate with Democratic rival Joe Biden, prompting a massive jump in dictionary lookups for the word Tuesday night.

A man exercises while watching on TV as President Donald Trump and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden participate in the first presidential debate at the Health Education Campus of Case Western Reserve University, on Tuesday, Sept. 29, 2020, in Cleveland. (Yuri Gripas/Abaca Press/TNS)

Other terms that saw a spike in searches after the chaotic debate include "antifa," "s_tshow," "shush," "petulant," "white supremacy," "stand by" and "Proud Boys."

Searches for the word "logorrhea" _ which is defined as "excessive and often incoherent talkativeness or wordiness" _ increased by 56,000% on Merriam-Webster and more than 2,300% on Dictionary.com, according to the online lexicons.

The jump came moments after stunned cable news hosts struggled to describe how uncivil and rancorous the first presidential debate turned out to be, largely because of Trump's non-stop interruptions throughout the event.

"What happened on that debate stage was unlike anything that has ever happened on a presidential debate stage ever before," Maddow said during her network's coverage of the debacle, adding that Trump's performance was "a monstrous unintelligible display of logorrhea, which has absolutely nothing to do with civic discourse, with debate, or even with the integrity of the contest they're about to approach."

"Logorrhea" was "probably modeled" on the word "diarrhea," which comes from two Greek words _ "logos," meaning "word," and "-rrhea," from the verb that means "to flow," according to Merriam-Webster.

CNN host Dana Bash chose a more common term to describe Tuesday's disaster.

"That was a s _ tshow," she said on live TV while apologizing for being "a little bit crude."

Dictionary.com reported that searches for "s _ tshow" spiked 2,037% after the debate.

Most of the other trending terms came from the debate itself, including "Proud Boys," a white nationalist and men-only extremist group to which Trump gave a shout-out.

"Proud Boys, stand back and stand by," the Republican leader shamelessly told the misogynistic organization while refusing to condemn white supremacy.

Searches for "Proud Boys" on Dictionary.com went up by nearly 40,000% while "stand by" saw a 2,700% spike.

Merriam-Webster defines "stand back" as "to take a few steps backward." "Stand by," meanwhile," means "to be or to get ready to act."