Remember truthiness?
Stephen Colbert caused quite the stir when he introduced that particular noun in 2005 on the segment of his show aptly called “The Word.” (The fact that a prime-time news show even has a daily segment devoted to words is interesting in and of itself.)
The American Dialect Society, a committee I — a devotee of words — had never even heard of until that fateful day, chose to take this newly minted word and honor it with the title of “Word of the Year.”
Merriam-Webster quickly followed and, in 2006, truthiness (which is built into the dictionary on my word processing application) was again named “Word of the Year” and added to the dictionary in the following edition. While there was a spike on Google trends on the date of the word's unveiling to the public, Colbert gave himself the greatest bump when he used the word at the White House Correspondent’s dinner as part of his roast of then-President George W. Bush.
But would you even consider slipping truthiness into conversation today at the risk of sounding dated? Mr. Colbert himself doesn’t even use it in his show’s opener anymore, instead opting for the more current “Lincolnish” and “Freeberty,” neither of which appears to have changed the national lexicon.
Words fall in and out of vogue faster than last season’s new black. Language changes with the times, but in a larger sense than in the way slang changes from generation to generation. I’m talking about actual linguistic shifts in what words we use to express ourselves, not just “rad” or “cool” or “groovy.”
Once, I had a teacher in high school ask me to think without using words. It’s not impossible, but it’s hard; you’re stuck with mostly images.
I think we can all agree that language is one of the best forms of communication we know of. It is this massive, all-encompassing behemoth of a “thing” (for lack of a better word) that names everything we could conceive of or express.
Language is our everything. Everything we know, everything we feel, everything we are is made up by 26 little letters. Our world is a world based in language; humans control everything because we can effectively tell others what to do. Language is control.
But for being so expansive, language is flawed. The only way we can truly express ourselves is through language, but it’s limiting. Extremely limiting.
Think of all the words you wish existed. All of the feelings you wish you could express. Language prohibits us from actually saying what we mean because we don’t have the words to describe it.
It’s the ultimate Catch-22: language is all we have, but it can never be what we really need it to be. It’s the ultimate tool of expression, but can language ever really allow us to say what we feel? Does it allow us to say what we really mean?
I wish we could look at what truthiness did as something normal, routine — a force of change in the stuffy old rooms of dictionary editors instead of a comedic outlier that we will probably never tell our children about. I can only hope that somewhere in the not too distant future, a word will come along that changes everything again, that somewhere out there is a newly budded thought, a need for a particular sound that expresses a feeling that others can connect with. Because if we don’t keep adapting language and adding to it, its constraints will become that much more apparent.
Francesca Morizio is a double major in the College of Arts and Sciences and the Kogod School of Business. Please send comments and responses to:
edpage@theeagleonline.com
