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Comment by TazeTSchnitzel | Hacker News Reader

It's annoying that the word “propaganda” has ended up meaning “PR efforts I don't like”. There was once an era when propaganda was a normal word.

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When did propaganda not mean "PR efforts I don't like", especially government PR efforts?

Wikipedia says:

The term began taking a pejorative or negative connotation in the mid-19th century, when it was used in the political sphere

Do you long for the days of the 1850's?

AFAIK propaganda is used with a positive connotation as well. It's just debatable if you interpret a specific act of propaganda as positive or negative, depending on the objective of the message.

Despite this particular story which is probably a "matryoshka" of propaganda inside a propaganda inside... you are one step away from discovering the reason for the frequent appearance of Chekhov and Dostoevsky in HN :)

Please forgive my ignorance, but I don't understand (probably because of my lack of knowledge wrt Chekhov and Dostoevsky), yet I want to. At the risk of giving away the joke, could you explain your point to me?

I heard a great definition of propaganda recently.

It’s a British person having a good look.

I don't get it.

It sounds like "proper gander", where gander means "a look".

In case people are wondering, the analogy is to the appearance of a goose (the male goose is a gander) when it cranes its neck to look at something, and you can't use it in many places "look" fits, it's specifically an action so you can "take a gander" or "have a gander" but you don't just "gander" and the appearance of something is not its "gander".

(Ganda means to look)

Okay, but this is propaganda in the original sense of the word.

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