Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Truthiness and Podcast Words of the Year 2005

Well, we have said it along about the humanities, and now it has hit the world in general.

Via email from Bradenton, Florida (thank you) containing snips of articles in The Herald, we discover that The American Dialect Society (ADS) in its 16th annual words of the year vote, has chosen "truthiness" as the Word of the Year 2005, i.e. as the word best reflecting the year 2005. According to the ADS:

"Truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."

It used to be that we now call "truthiness" was simply "wishful thinking".

That same society also voted "podcast" as "the most useful word" of 2005, with podcast defined as "a digital feed containing audio or video files for downloading to a portable MP3 player. From the brand name MP3 player iPod + broadcast."
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