Is That A Fact?

A panel of linguists met to decide which new word best describes 2005. The word is truthiness.

This neologism was chosen by The American Dialect Society, winning out over other contenders that were some version of the terms which have been affixed to the posterior of Hurricane Katrina, henceforth known as “Katrinagate.” Obviously, when the sufix “-gate” is pasted onto a word, it means someone is convening a congressional investigation and someone else is about to be chosen – eeny, meany, miney, moe — as the fall guy for that particular gate to hell.

One of the specialists in lexicology said that truthiness means “truthy, not facty.” According to this group:

"The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts," he said. "Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going to make much progress."

Sounds like Dan Rather Redux to me...these guys must be sharing the outter darkness with ol’ Dan, swearing that the National Guard memo was truthy as all get out, even if it didn’t have any facts to back it up.

Creepy. This must be a bunch of academics, gathered together to hoist a few and write it off as a departmental expense. If this is the case, we know which point of view – “truthy” vs. “facty” – they subsribe to.

Makes you wonder: do they consider the laws of gravity to be true or to be factual?

And what do they have to say about how many angels can dance on the head of a lexicologist?

Needless to say this group convened in Albuquerque, not Minneapolis. It is February, after all.

And that's the truth.