Kafkatrap
noun, verb ·Rare ·Advanced level
Definitions
- 1 A sophistical rhetorical device in which any denial by an accused person serves as evidence of guilt.
"Jill said Jack was paranoid, and when he told her he was not she just nodded knowingly. It was a perfect Kafkatrap."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of Kafkatrap. alt-of
- 1 To employ a Kafkatrap against (someone). transitive
"The aim of the kafkatrap is to produce a kind of free-floating guilt in the subject, a conviction of sinfulness that can be manipulated by the operator to make the subject say and do things that are convenient to the operator's personal, political, or religious goals. Ideally, the subject will then internalize these demands, and then become complicit in the kafkatrapping of others."
- 2 Alternative letter-case form of Kafkatrap. alt-of
Example
More examples"Jill said Jack was paranoid, and when he told her he was not she just nodded knowingly. It was a perfect Kafkatrap."
Etymology
From Kafka + trap, coined by American programmer & open source advocate Eric S. Raymond in 2010 (see the quotation below) in reference to the novel Der Proceß (The Trial, 1925) by the Bohemian author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), in which a man is accused of crimes that are never specified, and every defense is treated as proof of guilt.
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Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.