BY MICHAEL SHERMER
WORDS EMBODY IDEAS, AND THEIR CHANGING USAGE and meaning are tracked by lexicographers in dictionaries, which therein become barometers of cultural trends. In 2006, for example, the American Dialect Society and Merriam-Webster’s both chose as their word of the year the neologism “truthiness”, introduced by the comedian Stephen Colbert on the premiere episode of his satirical mock news show The Colbert Report (on which I appeared twice1), meaning “the truth we want to exist.”2 It was a prescient comedic bit as a decade later three examples of truthiness entered our lexicon.
After Donald Trump’s Presidential inauguration on January 22, 2017, his special counselor Kellyanne Conway concocted the term “alternative facts” during a Meet the Press interview while defending White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s inaccurate statement about the size of the crowd that day. “Our press secretary, Sean Spicer, gave alternative facts to that [the inaugural crowd size], but the point remains that….” at which time NBC correspondent Chuck Todd cut her off: “Wait a minute. Alternative facts? … Alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”3 German linguists deemed it the “un-word of the year” (Unwort des Jahres) for 2017. Later that year the related term “fake news” became common parlance, leaping in usage 365 percent and landing it on the “word of the year shortlist” of Collins Dictionary, which defined it as “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of news reporting.”4