ABSTRACT
This essay undertakes a wide-ranging assessment of the ways current transformations in global political formations are being configured within Western news discourses. Inspired by but not modeled after Raymond Williams’s (1976) Keywords, this analysis identifies some of the structures, conditions, and theoretical issues that need to be addressed to construct a vocabulary of key terms in the current interpretive crises. Situated within the assumptions of media-critical theory, it examines the relevance of recent feminist and philosophical approaches to metaphor, how terms become naturalized in political discourse, key terms in post-cold war political linguistics, and their implications for democracy and the critical spirit.
