Truthiness morphing

[David Bowie]

I subscribe to several of the Woody's Office Watch family of email
newsletters, and the past few "EMAIL Essentials" ones have dealt with
spam filtering. Near the beginning of the latest one is the following:

    You and I can glance at a message and know right-away if it's
    spam or not. Computers are nowhere near as smart and probably
    never will be, all a spam filter can do is analyse a message
    and work out the likelihood that it is spam. It’s not a simple
    Yes/No but a sliding scale of (with apologies to Stephen
    Colbert) 'spaminess'.

I would have probably spelled it "spamminess" myself, but it's
interesting to see "-iness" being used actively to mean something like
"something like this noun, but not exactly like it" with an overt nod to
the Colbert Report.

--
David Bowie                               University of Central Florida
     Jeanne's Two Laws of Chocolate: If there is no chocolate in the
     house, there is too little; some must be purchased. If there is
     chocolate in the house, there is too much; it must be consumed.

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