Meaning Ruptures and Meaningful Eruptions in the Service of Rhetoric: Populist Flare-Up Hits the Greek Political Pitch

Abstract

The present chapter focuses on the use of the term ‘populism’ in the European political scene, and more specifically in the political arena of a European country in crisis, Greece. Its aim is to show how political terms can develop new senses, or even subvert their old ones, and how these terms with the newly acquired sense can be a prime weapon in the rhetorical and ultimately political arsenal of politicians, in order to serve their intents and purposes, create a ‘Self and us’ position vis-à-vis an ‘Other’ position in a polarized antagonistic schema of common-sense ‘us’ and extremist ‘them’, discredit ‘Other’ policies and rally people around their own ‘common-sense’ beneficial policies and practices, forging political ideologies of polarization. In this process, a term signifying a political movement or programme, an ideology or a political practice becomes prey to the purposes of strategic processes of depoliticization adopted by political parties with their own political agendas. The claims are also supported by findings from applying the methodology of corpus linguistics. The scope of this chapter falls squarely within the purview of institutional powerful language use.¹