In the tradition of truthiness and faminess
... comes a word we have long needed here at Language Log Plaza:
referenciness.
From Michael Quinion's
World
Wide Words site:
REFERENCINESS
Paul Farrington and I both spotted this word in an article in the
Guardian on Monday, about a British
TV presenter who has agreed to stop using the title "Doctor" from a
non-accredited college in the US, after a complaint to the Advertising
Standards Authority. (
This link
will get you the full story.) The writer, Dr Ben Goldacre, used
this word to suggest a supposed scholarly reference that wasn't a real
one: "The scholarliness of her work is a thing to behold: she produces
lengthy documents that have an air of 'referenciness' ... but when you
follow the numbers, and check the references, it's shocking how often
they aren't what she claimed them to be." Mr Farrington and I
both wondered if he has borrowed the ending from Stephen Colbert's
"truthiness", which describes things that a person claims to know,
without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or actual
facts. Dr Goldacre confirms that this was his inspiration.
(Hat tip to Paul Farrington, who sent me the item in e-mail with the
header "Anotheriness".)
I was, of course, immediately reminded of the winner of the first
Gropius
Becanus Prize (the "Becky"), awarded by the Language Log to people
or organizations who have made outstanding contributions to linguistic
misinformation: Louann Brizendine. For an account of the
achievements that made Brizendine the unanimous choice for the Becky,
see Geoff Nunberg's "Fresh Air"
piece on
the prize.
Brizendine is a virtuoso of referenciness -- references that don't
support the claims made in the text (or, in fact, run counter to these
claims), references that aren't even relevant to them. She
displays truthiness backed up by referenciness, which together have
garnered her a certain amount of faminess.
The new, and obviously spreading, suffix
-iness (the Colbert Suffix) is
actually a sequence of two suffixes, the
-y of (disparaging) approximation
(similar in import to the hedging
-ish),
forming adjectives from nouns, and the
-ness forming abstract nouns from
adjectives. Truthiness is the quality of being truthy rather than
true; faminess the quality of being fame-y rather than famous; and
referenciness the quality of being reference-y rather than providing
actual references. No doubt there will be more. I could
certainly see a place for
justiciness
(though it is, I believe, not yet attested).
zwicky at-sign csli period stanford period edu
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at March 2, 2007 03:31 PM