purpose of WOTY contests

Wed Aug 30 15:44:30 UTC 2006

I think of WOTY as an entertainment, one that we share with the public. And I think that publicity is useful in achieving the serious purposes Ron mentions: it won't hurt the American Dialect Society if lots of people have heard that there IS one; whether they can remember exactly what we do is less important, because they can look it up.

Is "serious vs. publicity stunt" perhaps a false dichotomy? And while we have seen no uptick in membership as a result of publicity (OK by me), and while we did see a slight downturn in membership about the time WOTY came to be, it shouldn't be assumed that there's any connection among any of these phenomena.

I have found the discussion of what Google tells us about the early history of words very interesting -- I'm really grateful for it and would like to thank those who have contributed to it. But I resist the assumption that a word's success (especially the "validity" of any WOTY) depends on how many times the word is registered in an on-line database. First, I have yet to see that such dbs are representative of all speech. Second, longevity isn't the ONLY measure of a word's success. Third, separation from phenomena that stimulate actuation is not necessarily a virtue (in other words, why exclude Colbert-related use of "truthiness"?) -- "Katrina" was a reasonable alternative to "truthiness," but when people stop talking about the hurricane in particular, use of the name for a hurricane will drop of sharply. "Katrina" might still be "the WOTY," though, as a word's significance in the zeitgeist might have to do neither with frequency of use nor with longevity of use -- it might!
  be discovered, in an act of interpretation, long after the fact of its use.

How does "truthiness" measure on Metcalf's FUDGE scale? I haven't worked it all out, but, eyeballing the evidence, I guess that, at the present time, it looks more successful than many words (new or reactuated) and less successful than others.

Anyway, I think that it was a pretty good choice from among other good nominations. I don't think that we should seek publicity; I don't thnk that we should shun it. And, like Steve and Ron, I am all for a little whimsy in a conference program (appropriately) filled with seriousness.

-----Original Message-----
From: RonButters at AOL.COM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Sent: Wed, 30 Aug 2006 9:36 AM
Subject: purpose of WOTY contests

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
________________________________________________________________________
Check out AOL.com today. Breaking news, video search, pictures, email and IM. All on demand. Always Free.

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