Ideograph

From DigitalRhetoricCollaborative

Introduction

An ideograph is a word or phrase with a vague definition which represents an ambiguous set of ideas. This causes ideographs to be able to be used without sending a particular message because people can be affected in several ways by the way the ideograph is used or by their own interpretation of it. The term was first used by Michael Calvin McGee in 1980 to describe certain words used in political discourse.^[1]