Tuesday, January 10, 2006

"Truthiness" word of the year!

Here's the whole story:
http://www.cnn.com/2006/US/01/07/word.contest.ap/

Truthiness is the word of the year! The official definition:
  • the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.
Or, in other words, "Truthy, not facty".

What you won't read in that article is that the word was invented by Stephen Colbert of Comedy Central's The Colbert Report, one of the few truly brilliant examples of satire ever to grace American televison.

Last night, Stephen Colbert berated Professor Michael Adams of North Carolina State University (actually, Visiting Associate Professor) for mischaracterizing his word, and Associated Press writer Heather Clark for failing to list him as the originator of the word. For these sins Adams was "put on notice" (by having his name added to the On Notice board) and Clark was "dead to me" (by having her name added to the "Dead To Me" board).

And why am I even telling you this? You should have seen it for yourself!

(Oh, and my other favourite words of last yere were "cruisazy" and "muffin top". Go read the article to find out their definitions...)

1 comment:

Unknown said...

So she's the exact opposite of the "language police", who want to freeze language whenever possible.

Did people figure out what she was saying? Did she invent useful words, or was she simply ignorant of a proper word?