pastcast, v.

To ascribe, assign, bestow to historical personages, as a defining property or characteristic, contemporary theories, doctrines, beliefs which they did not or could not have held.

1939 J. Joyce, F. Wake. 314 Paradoxmutose caring, but here in a present booth of Ballaclay, Barthalamou, where their dutchuncler mynhosts and serves them dram well right for a boors' interior (homereek van hohmryk) that salve that selver is to screen its auntey and has ringround as worldwise eve her sins (pip, pip, pip) willpip futurepip feature apip footloose pastcast with spareshins and flash substittles of noirse-made-earsy from a nephew mind the narrator but give the devil his so long as those sohns of a blitzh call the tuone tuone and thonder alout makes the thurd. 2007 S.E. Kaufman, Diss. 171  In Social Darwinism in American Thought (1944), written during the decade in which the [Modern] Synthesis gradually coalesced, Richard Hofstadter pastcasts a heavily synthesized Darwinism into fin de siècle American culture as a means of justifying New Deal social policy through an implicit comparison of the consequences of Roosevelt's interventionist approach to the depredations brought about by the laissez-faire policies of the Gilded Age.

Comments

[David Moles]

Yeah, except when you use it I can actually tell from context what you mean.

[Adam Roberts]

David ... were you addressing Scott, or James Joyce?

[todd.]

I'm sure you've already seen this, but just in case.

[JPool]

Is this an oblique response to Tim Burke's "There Must Be a Word" post of a while back?

The only problem I can see with this definition is the possible slippage between arguing against the improper attribution of contemporary conceptual systems to those who didn't hold them and the argument that one often sees following on from this, that one cannot judge past or present culturally different actors based on our own conceptual systems or analyze their actions in terms that they would not themselves recognize (both of which are of course both reasonable and necessary). But we'll leave such errors to your future less skilled acolytes.

[Tim Lacy]

Great job mimicing the OED. I had to look at it 3 times: but I'm slow I guess.

But seriously, in history we simply call this "presentism" - without regard to the object studied (book, person, structure, etc.).

Of course I might just be a curmudgeon slow on the uptake today. - TL

[Sisyphus]

And here I had hoped it was like podcasting, except with time travel.

When ya gonna get around to inventing that, huh, Kaufman??

[eb]

You Are There

[David Moles]

Adam, I think I'd need an interpreter to talk to Joyce.