John Pilger, who has died aged 84, was a journalist and documentary maker for whom the word uncompromising might have been invented; he was also probably the only one to inspire his own neologism; in 1991 The Oxford English Dictionary of New Words included the verb “to Pilger”, which it defined as “to conduct journalism in a manner supposedly characteristic of (Australian author and journalist) John Pilger”.

The term had been coined by the conservative journalist and satirist Auberon Waugh, who explained that “it means when anybody who wants to make a good argument shouts and waves his arms about a lot and, oh, vaguely blames you for murdering Vietnamese babies”. For A. A. Gill it was “a particularly monotonous, self-righteous, partial and ism-bound view of the world, posing as journalism”. It should perhaps be pointed out, for students of etymology, that Waugh also coined the terms pilgerism, pilgered, pilgering, pilgerish, pilgerise, pilgeristic, pilgeresque, pilgerite, pilgeration and even pilgerama.

The Telegraph London