And Nothing But the Truthiness

I'm not sure how many of you watch The Colbert Report. It's not as funny as The Daily Show, on average, but can still be worth some good laughs.

For the last week or so, Stephen Colbert has been getting lots of mileage out of the fact that the American Dialect Society named "truthiness" the 2005 Word of the Year -- a word he himself coined in the show's first broadcast in October.

Now maybe I'm hanging in the wrong circles, but outside of that original broadcast, I have never heard anyone use the word "truthiness." Honestly, however funny the joke might have been at the time, I had most certainly forgotten about it completely until it was brought up again last week. So where exactly are these throngs of people using "truthiness" so much that it merits being the Word of the Year? You'd think they'd really be working overtime, considering the word didn't even exist but for less than a quarter of the year.

I'm not saying I'm totally cutting edge or anything. I'm not "hip" to the new-fangled "lingo" the young "hipsters" are using these days. Still, I feel fairly confident in assuming the folks at the American Dialect Society are far less cool than I. How can they have heard of this if I hadn't?

So I decided to dig a little (it wasn't hard, thanks to Wikipedia taking over the internet) and find out some of the other words to have been named "Word of the Year" in the past.

Okay, some of these make sense. 1992: "Not!" 1993: "Information Superhighway." 2003: "Metrosexual." Hell, you still hear these words. 1999: "Y2K." I'm not sure that's really a word, but you can't deny that in 1999, you couldn't go two minutes without hearing it.

But then things start to get a little bizarre. 1996: "Mom (as in Soccer Mom)." Why not just "Soccer Mom?" Clearly, you'd already bent the rules in 1993 with "Information Superhighway," allowing more than one word to be declared the Word (singular) of the Year. Why not just do that again?

1998: "e-" Come on. That's not even a word, it's a prefix.

2004: "Red state, blue state, purple state." Now you're just picking a bunch of phrases. This could maybe be a line from some Dr. Seuss book I've never read, but it's definitely nowhere near a "word." And seriously, did you know anyone who said "purple state?"

But arguably, none are worse than where it all started, 1990: "Bushlips." Alright, granted I was a teenager at the time and therefore totally self-absorbed and not paying much attention to society's use of language, but I'd never even heard of the phrase "Bushlips." I would think if it had ever received any serious play then, we'd have been seeing a replay of it by now, as we begin our sixth year of Bush the Younger.

Nope. Sorry. I can't give the American Dialect Society any credit. Even if they apparently find Stephen Colbert amusing as I do.