“Truthiness”

I’d heard about The American Dialect Society before – a group of linguists who sort through ‘new’ words in the English language and bring them to light and, possibly, to dictionary inclusion. They were in the news again yesterday, having just announced their ‘word of the year’ – a word “that best reflects 2005”:

• Truthiness, the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts. “Truthiness” means “truthy, not facty.”

In an editorial aside, members suggest that until we manage to get ‘truth’ back together with ‘fact,’ we “aren’t going to make a lot of progress.”

I don’t know about that. I think many of our politicians and business leaders – accountants, for example, or environmentalists – have made a great deal of progress by separating the two. (If progress is defined by personal gain, of course.)

It’s a killer of a concept, isn’t it? Think of the applications – the implications. Imagine how often ‘truthiness’ is the prime consideration as research statistics have been culled, cited and quoted in support of a particular position that has significant political or economic impact. Or how often ‘truthiness’ has guided the direction of a particular news story that has enough human interest to be a potential Pulitzer Prize winner? How much of Global Warming is ‘truthy’ not ‘facty?’ How much of what we ‘know’ about central banking, about the United Nations Food Program, about immigration, or nutrition, or cancer, or education reform is leaning toward ‘truthy’ and short on 'facty?' The Korean stem-cell researcher turned out to be a fraud, exposed just recently. You have to admit that the Food Pyramid was a bit of a mess. Truthiness at its finest.

So my hat’s off to the linguists for giving us a new way to talk about this!

Oh yes, one last marvelous bit of inspiration from The American Dialect Society:

“In a runoff for the most creative word, “whale tail,” the appearance of a thong above the waistband, beat out “muffin top,” the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-riding jeans.”