purpose of WOTY contests

Thu Aug 31 00:12:23 UTC 2006

Exactly. If we attempt to maintain that WOTY is anything but whimsy, then
the ADS is supporting the idea that it is some prescriptivist authority and
that such pronouncements serve a real scholarly purpose. The point is to
have a bit of fun and perhaps promote some sound linguistic principles in
the process.

By no means should we infer that a word's validity resides in an online
database. It's just that Google, or another database, can give us a rough,
first-order approximation of a term's popularity. The reason for consulting
a variety of databases is that they cover a variety of different users.
LexisNexis gives data on publications; Technorati covers blogs; Google
Groups shows the more casual patterns of Usenet, etc. (LexisNexis is
probably not the first place to look for slang usages.)

By excluding "Colbert" from searches of "truthiness" I was attempting to
roughly determine how strongly the word was linked with that
show--diversity, the "D" in Metcalf's FUDGE. (Pretty strong link, but by no
means exclusive.) It's not that such contexts are any less legitimate than
others.

And for the record, I voted for "Katrina," but I think "truthiness" is a
fine choice.

--Dave Wilton
  dave at wilton.net

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU] On Behalf Of
Michael Adams
Sent: Wednesday, August 30, 2006 8:45 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: purpose of WOTY contests

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.

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