-ism

History

The first recorded usage of the suffix ism as a separate word in its own right was in 1680. By the nineteenth century it was being used by Thomas Carlyle to signify a pre-packaged ideology. It was later used in this sense by such writers as Julian Huxley and George Bernard Shaw. In the United States of the mid-nineteenth century, the phrase "the isms" was used as a collective derogatory term to lump together the radical social reform movements of the day (such as slavery abolitionism, feminism, alcohol prohibitionism, Fourierism, pacifism, Technoism, early socialism, etc.) and various spiritual or religious movements considered non-mainstream by the standards of the time (such as transcendentalism, spiritualism, Mormonism etc.). Southerners often prided themselves on the American South being free from all of these pernicious "Isms" (except for alcohol temperance campaigning, which was compatible with a traditional Protestant focus on individual morality). So on September 5 and 9, 1856, the Examiner newspaper of Richmond, Virginia, ran editorials on "Our Enemies, the Isms and their Purposes", while in 1858 Parson Brownlow called for a "Missionary Society of the South, for the Conversion of the Freedom Shriekers, Spiritualists, Free-lovers, Fourierites, and Infidel Reformers of the North" (see The Freedom-of-thought Struggle in the Old South by Clement Eaton). In the present day, it appears in the title of a standard survey of political thought, Today's Isms by William Ebenstein, first published in the 1950s, and now in its 11th edition.

The concept of an -ism may resemble that of a grand narrative.

Skeptics of any given -isms can quote the dictum attributed to Eisenhower: "All -isms are wasms".

In 2004, the Oxford English Dictionary added two new draft definitions of -isms to reference their relationship to words that convey injustice:

• "Forming nouns with the sense 'belief in the superiority of one—over another'; as racism, sexism, speciesism, etc."
• "Forming nouns with the sense 'discrimination or prejudice against on the basis of—'; as ageism, bodyism, heightism, faceism, lookism, sizeism, weightism, etc."

In December 2015, Merriam-Webster Dictionary declared -ism to be the Word of the Year.

References

1. (2014). "-ism". Oxford University Press.
2. Such as [[hedonism]] or [[consumerism]]
3. Such as [[magnetism]]
4. Such as an [[embolism]], [[dwarfism]], or [[priapism]]
5. (2023). "ism suffix". Oxford University Press.
6. (15 September 2012). "The Modernity of Ancient Sculpture: Greek Sculpture and Modern Art from Winckelmann to Picasso". I.B.Tauris.
7. (2020). "Measures of Racism, Sexism, Heterosexism, and Gender Binarism for Health Equity Research: From Structural Injustice to Embodied Harm{{snd}}An Ecosocial Analysis". Annual Review of Public Health.
8. "The Word of the Year is: -ism {{!}} Merriam-Webster".