The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

[Steve Kl.]

On Thu, 17 Aug 2006, Cohen, Gerald Leonard wrote:

>    Ron's point in this and his subsequent e-mails on the subject is
> valid: Whichever word ADS selects as word of the year should be one that
> actually dominates the lexical scene of the preceding year--something on
> the order of "Katrina" or "tsunami." There are probably many educated
> speakers of English who never even heard of "truthiness." Its selection
> as Word of The Year by ADS represents a bit of whimsy, a flight of
> fancy, an idea which should have been classified among the also-rans
> rather than the big winner.

Truthiness is extremely mediagenic and garnered more publicity for the ADS
and the WoTY than I'd ever seen. (Do we know if this resulted in an uptick
in memberships, by the way?)

I'm a big proponent of whimsy by the way. I don't think there's anything
in the by-laws that slaps down whimsy.

Not to mention that Mike is still "on notice."

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