The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

[Dave Wilton]

Another way to quickly look at a term or concepts popularity is Google
Trends, which measures the incidence of a term's use in searches on Google.

The results for "truthiness" are here:
http://www.google.com/trends?q=truthiness

The first, big spike corresponds to the WOTY vote. The second, smaller spike
in mid-2006 corresponds to Stephen Colbert's appearance at the White House
Correspondent's dinner.

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net

-----Original Message-----
From: Dave Wilton [mailto:dave at wilton.net]
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 6:14 PM
To: 'American Dialect Society'
Subject: RE: The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

Google Groups shows a steadier pattern:

2005
Oct.    6
Nov.    1
Dec.    0

2006
Jan.    41
Feb.    77
Mar.    45
Apr.    43
May     42
Jun.    54
Jul.    38
Aug.    68 (through 17 Aug.)

I would attribute the spike in LexisNexis as due to news coverage of the
initial WOTY vote, followed by a rapid fading in news coverage as the
novelty wore off. The steady rate of approx. 45/month in Google Groups is
probably due to that medium being more prone to slang usage than the edited
pieces in LexisNexis.

I wish Technorati allowed you to sort results by date. Use of "truthiness"
is rampant in the blogosphere--over 8,000 hits, with over 4,000 for
"truthiness NOT colbert".

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Fred Shapiro
Sent: Monday, August 28, 2006 10:47 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: The not-so-slow death of truthiness?

On Mon, 28 Aug 2006, Steve Kl. wrote:

> 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?)

For the benefit of truthimetricians, here are the month-by-month figures
for _truthiness_ hits in LexisNexis:

2005
Oct.    9
Nov.    3
Dec.    4

2006
Jan.    96
Feb.    59
Mar.    49
Apr.    33
May     74
June    39
July    17
Aug.    20  (as of Aug. 28)

This seems to be an example of the observation (WOTY vote) having a clear
impact on the phenomenon observed.

Fred Shapiro


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Fred R. Shapiro                             Editor
Associate Librarian for Collections and     YALE BOOK OF QUOTATIONS
   Access and Lecturer in Legal Research     Yale University Press,
Yale Law School                             forthcoming
e-mail: fred.shapiro at yale.edu               http://quotationdictionary.com
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