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Word of the Year - "Truthiness"
KingSkippus writes "Stephen Colbert calls it 'truth that comes from the gut, not books.' Merriam-Webster calls it their 2006 Word of the Year. The word, first introduced [Windows media] on 'The Word' segment of The Colbert Report, won by a five-to-one margin. In spite of Colbert's ironic dismissal of dictionaries and other reference books, will Colbert's coined word actually be added to those books? With media outlets like CNN and MSNBC covering it, the idea may very well have truthiness."
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And I was using it right there, too. Maybe it was misinterpreted, but I meant that in our gut we want it to be a real word, and the media outlets are kind of playing it up for such, but for right now and probably in the foreseeable future, it still isn't.
In my brain, I honestly don't think that "truthiness" will be added to a dictionary any time soon. Maybe I'm wrong and it actually will be. But for now, the word remains just something we feel sounds like it should be in there, and undoubtedly, some people will use it in everyday speech as a real word.
Not really, I was actually shooting for a little conspicuous sarcasm there. The idea that truthiness is a so-called "legitimate" word is false, plain and simple. Evidence otherwise would be that it's in a standard dictionary, which for now, it's still not.
There are a lot of people who think that CNN and MSNBC and other major media outlets are the Truth (or even "Fair and Balanced," right?). And I'm not saying they're 100% fake. But the gist of what I was getting at is that it's possible that with enough publicity, people may think that "truthiness" is a real word, when in fact it's not. If enough people eventually use it so that Websters and other dictionaries do consider it a legitimate word, then the idea moves out of the realm of truthiness and into the realm of truth from evidence. But for now, it's clearly still in the former, not the latter.