purpose of WOTY contests

[RonButters at AOL.COM]

In a message dated 8/28/06 11:59:42 AM, stevekl at PANIX.COM writes:


> 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.
>

I suspect--given the history of membership over the past 10 years--that there
has been no uptick. Indeed, if anything, the size of the organization has
tended to shrink since the New Words contests became a media publicity stunt. But
would we really want new members who joined simply because they wanted to be
a part of an organization devoted to "whimsy"?

If the New Words Events are just publicity stunts, then I suppose that the
selection of TRUTHINESS can be defended in the way that Steve describes. But I
keep asking myself, "Why does the American Dialect Society, a scholarly
organization, need this kind of publicity?" It seems to me that we are sending mixed
messages: we have some serious things to say about language in America, but we
present ourselves to the public is as a source of arch publicity stunts and
purveyors of "whimsy," and that is what they remember. Do we really have a
purpose here consonant with our charge, or is this something that mostly just
amuses us for a couple of hours at a "scholarly" convention and gratifies our egos
in that it gets us on TV and in the papers?

Someone commented here that TRUTHINESS did seem to capture the spirit of the
times or something like that. If that is our goal, we need to enunciate it a
little more clearly, and make sure we are not merely reflecting the political
views of the majority of those who sit on the floor at the annual meeting
(i.e., that conservatives lie to us when they are in power, the mirror image of the
view that a lot of other people have, i.e., that liberals lie to us when they
are in power). One guy's spirit of the times is another guy's political
propaganda.

All of the evidence that I have seen here from Googlish searches indicates
that TRUTHINESS was a stunt word of very little linguistic significance until
ADS made minor linguistic history by creating enough interest in the word to
make it a minor buzz word--one that, as I see it, will go the way of BUSHLIPS.
But I will stay tuned. It will in itself be an interesting sociolinguistic
phenomenon if it turns out that the "whimsical" publicity stunt of an academic
lingjuistic organization turns out to have actually AFFECTED the history of the
lexicon.

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org