The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

[Dave Wilton]

A search of Technorati, which covers blogs, turns up over 8,000 hits for
"truthiness," some 4,000 of which appear if also search on "-Colbert". A
slang term like "truthiness" is more apt to appear in a non-edited format
like Usenet or in blogs than in the edited newspapers and journals of
Lexis-Nexis.

"Truthiness" is not the most popular of new words, but it clearly has a life
of its own. I've been encountering it more and more frequently. I think it
will be around for a while. (FWIW, I did not vote for it as WOTY.)

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Dave Wilton
Sent: Thursday, August 17, 2006 6:52 PM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

There is a distinction between "Google" and "Google Groups."

You are right, there is no way to date-sort Google hits, which are instances
of web pages using the search terms. And 1,800 web hits is not be all that
many.

But "Google Groups" is a search of Usenet posts. These can be classified by
date and Usenet is a much smaller universe than the web. 1,800 Usenet hits
in six months is a significant number. (For comparison, "truthiness" gets
some 920,000 web hits; "hamdan" gets some 3 million web hits, but only 1,500
Google Groups hits in the last six months; "anthrax" gets over 25 million
web hits and some 8,200 Google Groups hits in the six-month period.)

To search Google Groups, go to www.google.com and click the "more>>" link,
then click the "Groups" option. (It used to be one of the main choices, but
has been supplanted by "Images", "Video", and "Maps.")

--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: Thursday, August 17, 2006 7:17 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

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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>
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>

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