The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

I didn't use Google because I didn't know how to sort out the most recent 
uses from the earlier ones (when the fad was in full bloom). 1800 Google hits in 
6 months does not seem like a lot for a word that was declared "Word of the 
Year" only 8 months ago. And I wonder how many of those hits were in the first 
four months of the 6.

106 ProQuest hits (those not mentioning Colbert) in 6 months is likewise 
pretty puny. And same question: how many of those hits were in the first four 
months of the 6?

Given that LexisNexis offers the OPTION of searching the past week and the 
past month, I assumed that they get the postings online pretty quickly. I do 
recall that one of the responses was fairly late in August. I   WAS using 
"LexisNexis Academic," which is not as powerful as the regular LexisNexis (one has to 
be a law professor at Duke to have access to the regular LexisNexis). Still, 
the relative figures for the words I searched for should be about the same.

To my mind, the Google report simply confirms the view that TRUTHINESS is a 
mere stunt word that got a lot of publicity, not something that is 
lexicographically important in its own right--except as an example of how a stunt word can 
make a brief splash--and how a scholarly society can go giddy in the glare of 
national publicity (all in good fun, of course).

In a message dated 8/17/06 9:44:46 AM, dave at WILTON.NET writes:


> You may be searching in the wrong place. Google Groups gives over 1800 hits
> for "truthiness" over the last six months, including nearly 1500 where
> "Colbert" doesn't appear in the same post.
> 
> Proquest Newspapers has some 200 hits for the same period, including 94 that
> do not have "Colbert."
> 
> How fast does LexisNexis include recent publications? ProQuest has hits as
> late as 14 August. If LexisNexis takes its time updating its database, that
> may help explain the paucity of hits in recent months.
> 
> --Dave Wilton
>   dave at wilton.net
> 
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
> RonButters at AOL.COM
> Sent: Wednesday, August 16, 2006 6:26 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject: The not-so-slow death of truthiness?
> 
> This caused me to think, "Whatever happened to truthiness?" A quick check of
> 
> LexisNexis Academinc shows 69 hits in the past six months, 3 in the last
> month, and 0 in the past week. This makes it about as well used as LIMPID
> and only
> slightly ahead of OTIOSE and RECONDITE. Franklin Pierce is more popular.
> 
> At least ADS didn't vote it "most likely to succeed." Maybe "Most likely to
> suck as a real word" would have been a better category?
> 
> In a message dated 8/16/06 9:31:21 AM, wuxxmupp2000 at YAHOO.COM writes:
> 
> 
> > No puns on "fictional" allowed !
> >
> >   JL
> >
> > Charles Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU> wrote:
> >   ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> > -----------------------
> > Sender: American Dialect Society
> > Poster: Charles Doyle
> > Subject: Re: 1851 jest about trad repertoire
> >
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
> -
> > --
> >
> > Hmmm. Fictional evidence. Is that a little like truthiness?
> >
> >
> >
> >
> >
> 
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