Queception

[kyoo - sep - shuh n]
A portmanteau from the words question and deception.

Queception (n) - the art of not answering questions; the act of answering a question with an answer that does not actually answer the question.


I came up with the word from watching some of the press coverage of the current presidential election. It seems as if every single candidate is hiding something, and many of them have gotten really good at avoiding tough questions by using deceptive and distracting tactics to avoid giving a real answer. Some of these tactics include: excessive talking that starts out on topic but ends on a completely different topic; answering a question very broadly without giving any details as to how something will happen; repeating a previous answer; and answering a question with with another question (question inception).

I used queception as often as I could over the past 2 weeks, which was actually pretty easy to do with all of the election coverage and the political conversations that spawn from it. I definitely had quite a few people laugh at it just because they knew it wasn't a thing (yet), but many were pretty accepting of it and I even had one friend who used it later in the same conversation. I was also able to convince my mom that it was already a thing which was pretty funny. I think that this is something that we have all seen recently and is pretty easily identifiable when it happens so I definitely think that it could catch on!