CCT300_Lab_9

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/17/magazine/17FOB-onlanguage-t.html?_r=1

The article talks about a neologism, a new word that was born out of mere creativity and deeper reflection.In the article, Stephen Colbert was in search for a word that would describe the character that he was playing in Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report.” He was trying to find a word that would describe a “well-intentioned, poorly informed, high-status idiot". In the quest for this WORD, many iterations came about, out which many felt "not dumb enough". Finally, the final version was the word TRUTH, rolling out an entire thread to finally form "truthiness" (writing this word makes Wiki-spaces grammar check underline it in red, meaning it is misspelled...when it is not, one would think computers were intelligent enough to know about Stephen Colbert and his search for the word...but they are not. Fine, I clicked "add to dictionary"-problem solved, now the world has one more word to play word games with). It is a kind of cool, a nonexistent word, but it has the potential to have a whole lot of meanings attached to it. It is like a container that can be filled with new meanings. It is perhaps one to be added to a whole array of "established" words in our language such as LOL, ROFL, LMAO etc. (they no longer have the status of acronims, because one would rarely have anyone ask well what they stand for).

Now the big question is why does TRUTH need to be the one breaking the ice of making up new words to represent concepts that already have a linguistic representation? Truth is often an arbitrary, controversial and poignant term that has the potential of causing dismay. Our lives are defined by quest for the truth, but what if this concept of universality of it is no longer applicable? In that case, we have to construct multiple versions of it. I choose to have "truth-ility" and "truth-ability" to define other noun forms of it, and they can be defined as my own versions of what truth is.

In terms of politics, the concept is deeply rooted in the idea that universality of truth is nonexistent, but the search for it is. More so, the internet and social media have set this whole field on fire. For example, //Truthy// is a factual checker in the form of software for Twitter aimed at checking for political misinformation.Bringing this problem to a whole new level, we give computers the role of a decision maker for what truth is. It is interesting to wrap your head around the idea of having an algorithm, (performing based on a set of rules) decide for what truth is.