Today, triumphalism has a broader connotation, in the sense of excessive or blind pride in the achievements of one’s country. Now for some more ‘today-words’.

Iraqnophobia is an unusually strong fear of Iraq, especially its ability to manufacture and use biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. It is a play on arachnophobia, an unusually strong fear of spiders. It represents one side of a debate, because almost exclusively people who are against going to war with Iraq are using it. First appearing when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, while the movie Arachnophobia was playing in theatres, the initial references were word games based on the film’s title. In print, it appeared for the first time as the caption of an editorial cartoon by Clay Bennett on August 3, 1990, in St Petersburg Times. The cartoon showed a spider labelled ‘Iraq’ menacing Kuwait and the caption read ‘Saddam Hussein Presents Iraqnophobia’.

Writers and other members of the intelligentsia who advocate war or imperialism are today the ‘belligerati’, a word coined for writers who use an angry and confrontational style. A blend word made up of ‘belligerent + literati’, it first appeared in a review of the books The War Against Cliché by Martin Amis and Letters to a Young Contrarian by Christopher Hitchens. Another blend word is xerocracy (Xerox+democracy), a society in which censorship is so pervasive that the only way to disseminate information is via photocopied documents and newsletters that have to be written clandestinely. In a lighter vein, it can also be ‘rule by whoever feels like doing the photocopying’.

Joseph S., Nye, Jr, former dean of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University coined the phrase ‘soft power’ in 1990. In his 1990 book Bound to Lead, soft power emerged as an idea that led to the publication of Soft Power: The Means to Succeed in World Politics in 2004. For Nye, soft power is the ability to attract and persuade rather than coerce. It stems from the attractiveness of a nation’s culture, ideals and policies; in contrast to hard power that grows out of military or economic might. Today, China and India are two soft power nations.