weapon of mass destruction / WMD /conventional weapon

2 April 2025

Most people became aware of the terms weapon of mass destruction and WMD during the run up to the first Gulf War in 1990–91. And they again entered the public consciousness during the second war with Iraq which started twelve years later. Both times Saddam Hussein had been thought to have developed nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, an assessment that was only correct the first time. But the term is much older than widespread public awareness of it.

The term weapon of mass destruction dates to at least 27 December 1937, when it was used by William Cosmo Gordon Lang, the archbishop of Canterbury in a speech. He uttered the phrase in the context of the bombing of cities in Spain and China by fascist air forces. Lang was using the term not in the sense of nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons, but rather conventional weapons that were used indiscriminately against civilians:

Who can think without horror of what another widespread war would mean, waged as it would be with all the new weapons of mass destruction? Yet how fruitless seem to be all efforts to secure a really settled peace.

The abbreviation WMD dates to at least 1985, when it appears in a master’s thesis on the Outer Space Treaty of 1966. Again, the definition here is an expansive one:

Taking into account the circumstances under which the Space Treaty was concluded, it would be difficult to view Article IV a derogation of the common interest principle. Aside from Article IV(2) which totally demilitarize [sic] the moon and other celestial bodies, the ban under Article IV (1) on the “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD) is noteworthy. The concept of WMD is not a static one. It not only embraces weapons of this kind which had existed before the conclusion of the Space Treaty, such as chemical and biological weapons; but also encompasses weapons of mass destruction to be developed in future. In judging whether a particular weapon is WMD, it is the effect and destructiveness caused by this weapon that should count, not the question of whether a weapon is conventional or non-conventional. Moreover, the means by which mass destruction can be caused is only secondary. The direct killing is equal to killing by destroying crops, by flooding large living areas, or by any other kind of modification of our natural environment.

Article IV of that 1966 treaty reads:

States Parties to the Treaty undertake not to place in orbit around the Earth any objects carrying nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass destruction, install such weapons on celestial bodies, or station weapons in outer space in any other manner.

The Moon and other celestial bodies shall be used by all States Parties to the Treaty exclusively for peaceful purposes. The establishment of military bases, installations and fortifications, the testing of any type of weapons and the conduct of military manœuvres on celestial bodies shall be forbidden. The use of military personnel for scientific research or for any other peaceful purposes shall not be prohibited. The use of any equipment or facility necessary for peaceful exploration of the Moon and other celestial bodies shall also not be prohibited.

The counterparts to WMD are conventional weapons. That retronym, used in contrast to nuclear weapons, appears, as one might expect, shortly after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is this from Illinois’s Centralia Evening Sentinel of 16 October 1945:

The general’s [i.e., Lt. Gen. Curtis LeMay’s] plain speaking is welcome at a time when the whole country has been understandably confused about the whole subject of atomic power. There has been a tendency to assume that there was no possible defense against the bomb, and that aircraft and other conventional weapons have been ruled out.

And there is this from Ohio’s Cincinnati Post of 4 July 1946, shortly after the first atomic tests on Bikini Atoll in the Pacific:

There is no tendency on the part of anybody here to question that the plutonium bomb is a vastly more dangerous weapon in the hands of any enemy than any conventional weapon ever conceived.

A note on usage. When I was working arms control issues in the Pentagon in the early 1990s, we actively tried to discourage use of the terms weapons of mass destruction and WMD. Our thinking was that nuclear weapons were orders of magnitude more destructive than even biological or chemical weapons, and that putting them in the same category was committing an analytical error and would lead to poor policy outcomes. We were not successful in quashing use of the terms.

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Sources:

Heath, S. Burton. “Bikini Atomic Bomb Blast Pleases Navy.” Cincinnati Post (Ohio), 4 July 1946, 16/4–5. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Huang, Jiefang. The Common Interest Principle in Space Law (LL.M thesis). Institute of Air and Space Law, McGill University, June 1985, 196–97. ProQuest Dissertations.

“In the Arm Chair.” Centralia Evening Sentinel (Illinois), 16 October 1945, 8/1. NewspaperArchive.com.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, 2005, s.v. weapon of mass destruction, n., WMD, n.

“Primate Appeals to the Individual in His Home.” Scotsman (Edinburgh), 27 December 1937, 15/3. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies (1966). United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.

Image credit: Fastfission, 2006. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

viking

28 March 2025

We all have a solid idea of what a viking was, one of a band of a horned-helmeted, Old Norse warriors who ravaged northern Europe in the medieval period. And that idea is wrong. Not only did viking helmets not have horns, the Norse people who sailed about the northern world were more likely to be peaceful merchants and traders than plundering raiders and pirates. Viking was an occupation, and an occasional gig at that, not an ethnic identity. Furthermore, the word viking is really three different, albeit etymologically related, words. There is the Old English wicing, the Old Norse vikingr, and our Present-Day English word viking. Each of these has slightly different meanings and very different histories.

The Old English wicing is formed through normal derivation, wic (camp) + -ing (person). So a wicing is a person who establishes a camp, much like a pirate might on a shore they were raiding. Wicing appears in the Épinal and Erfurt glossaries, two Latin-Old English word lists. The entriy in the Épinal glossary, which dates to the first half of the eighth century, reads:

piraticum    uuicingsceadan

And the Erfurt glossary, from the late eighth or early ninth century, reads:

piraticam    uuicingsceadae

The Latin piraticum means piracy, and the Old English wicingsceada literally means viking-like. Note that the Épinal glossary predates the period of Norse raids on the English coastline that started toward the end of the eighth century. The late ninth century translation of Orosius’s history also uses wicing, but that use is in the context of Philip of Macedon (the father of Alexander the Great) raiding in the Mediterranean:

Philippuse geþuhte æfter þæm þæt he an land ne mihte þæm folce mid gifum gecweman þe him an simbel wæron mid winnende; ac he scipa gegaderode, & wicingas wurdon, & sona æt anum cirre an C & eahtatig ceapscipa gefengon.

(Philip realized that on land he could not satisfy with gifts the people who had continually been fighting alongside him, so he gathered ships and went viking, and soon captured one hundred eighty merchant ships in one engagement.)

Similarly, in the Old English poem Exodus, a poetic retelling of some chapters of that biblical book, the Israelites making the Red Sea crossing are referred to as sæwicingas, or sea-vikings:

Æfter þære fyrde    flota modgade,
Rubenes sunu.    Randas bæron
sæ-wicingas    ofer sealtne mersc,
mana menio;    micel an-getrum
eode unforht.

(After that army the sea-force, the sons of Reuben, proudly marched. The sea-vikings, many a man, bore shields across the salt marsh. The great host went unafraid.)

As is the case with most Old English poetry, we don’t know when it was composed. But note that the term sea-vikings is being used to describe a land army, presumably because they are crossing the Red Sea. Depending on when the poem was written, it could also be an allusion to Norse raiders, but that would be a strange association for an English poet to make about the Israelites.

Indeed, wicing was used more generally to mean any plunderer. For instance, Wulfstan’s Sermo Lupi ad Anglos (Sermon of the Wolf to the English), written c. 1015, uses the word to refer to an enslaved person who has escaped and become an outlaw, in a passage condemning unjust laws:

Ðeah þræla hwilc hlaforde ætleape & of cristendome to wicinge wurþe, & hit æfter þam eft gewurþe þæt wæpengewrixl wurðe gemæne þegne & þræle, gif þræl þone þæne þegen fullice afylle, licge ægilde ealre his mægðe; and gif se þegen þone þræl þe he ær ahte fullice afylle, gilde þegengilde.

(Though a slave who escapes from their lord and from Christendom to become a viking, and afterward it happens that an exchange of weapons occurs between thane and slave, if the slave should outright kill that thane, [the thane] will lie without any compensation to his family; but if the thane kills outright that slave that he had once owned, he pays the price for killing a thane.)

Although here, unlike the Exodus poem, Wulfstan is undoubtedly also alluding to Norse raiders. Sermo Lupi ad Anglos is about how the decadent English society is being punished by God, and one of those punishments is viking raids.

In his grammar, written at the end of the tenth century, about two decades before Wulfstan’s sermon, Ælfric of Eynsham also deploys the word generally, but his use probably carries an allusion to Norse raiders as well. His gloss on the Latin pirata reads:

pirata wicing oððe scegðman

(pirate: viking or shipman)

Scegð being a type of fast sailing ship used by the Scandinavians.

There is an instance in Old English poetry where wicing is used as the name of a people, that is in the poem Widsith, which consists mainly of a long list of various peoples. One passage reads thusly:

Hroþwulf ond Hroðgar    heoldon lengest
sibbe ætsomne    suhtor-fædran,
siþþan hy forwræcon    wicinga cynn
ond Ingeldes    ord forbigdan,
forheowan æt Heorote    Heaðobeardna þrym.

(Hrothwulf and Hrothgar, uncle and nephew, together held the peace the longest, since they drove away the nation of vikings and humiliated the vanguard of Ingeld, cut down the Heathobard host at Heorot.)

The people and events in the passage are also referred to in the poem Beowulf. Exactly who the wicinga cynn were is not known, but since Hrothwulf and Hrothgar were Danes, it is unlikely that they refer to a Norse people. They may be a distinct group, or the phrase may be another name for Ingeld’s people, the Heathobards. Again, we don’t know exactly who the Heathobards were either, but they perhaps came from Saxony, or perhaps they were entirely fictional.

And in the poem the Battle of Maldon, written sometime after 991 C.E., wicing is used to refer to a Norse army invading England:

Þa stod on stæðe,    stiðlice clypode
wicinga ar,    wordum mælde,
se on beot abead    brimliþendra
ærænde to þam eorle,    þær he on ofre stod.

(Then stood on the shore, a viking messenger, sternly calling out, delivering a speech, uttering a vow, the seafarers’ message to the earl, where he stood on the opposite [shore].)

So the Old English wicing was used generically to refer to raiders or pirates, people of the camps. In some of these instances, it alluded to or specifically referred to Norse raiders, but that wasn’t its primary sense. And in one instance, it was used as the name of a people, but which people is not known, although it doesn’t seem to refer to a Nordic one. So what we have is the fact that the Old English wicing originally meant simply a generic pirate.

The Old English wicing fell out of use following the Norman Conquest.

As for the Old Norse vikingr, that is only first recorded later, in the late tenth century. It is most likely a borrowing from either the English or Anglo-Frisian wicing. It could, however, have been plausibly formed within Old Norse from the root vikr, meaning bay or inlet. In that case, a vikingr would be someone who ventured forth from a coastal inlet.

As for our Present-Day English word viking, that word is a nineteenth-century borrowing from the Old Norse, or perhaps a resurrection of the Old English wicing. It appears in medievalesque literature of that century. We see it in George Chalmer’s 1807 history of Scotland, Caledonia, in a passage about Torfin, grandson of King Malcom II of Scotland:

<p style="margin-left: 50px;">At the age of fourteen, Torfin commenced his career as a vikingr. His sails often disquieted the coasts of Scotland during the reign of his grandfather.

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Sources:

Ælfric. Ælfrics Grammatik und Glossar. Julius Zupitza, ed. Berlin: Weidmannsche, 1880, 24. Archive.org.

Anlezark, Daniel, ed. Old Testament Narratives. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 7. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2011, lines 331–35a, 228.

“The Battle of Maldon.” In Elliott van Kirk Dobbie, ed. The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems. Anglo-Saxon Poetic Record 6. New York: Columbia UP, 1942, lines 25–28, 7.

Chalmers, George. Caledonia (1807), vol. 1 of 3. Paisley, Scotland: Alexander Gardner, 1887, 341. Archive.org.

Fell, Christine. “Old English Wicing: A Question of Semantics” (13 November 1986). Proceedings of the British Academy, 72, 1986 295–316. The British Academy. 

Orosius. The Old English History of the World. Malcolm Godden, ed. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 44. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2016, 3.7, 172.

Oxford English Dicitionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. viking, n.

Pheifer, J. D. Old English Glosses in the Épinal-Erfurt Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, 39.

“Widsith.” In Robert E. Bjork, ed. Old English Shorter Poems; Vol. II: Wisdom and Lyric. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library 32, Cambridge, Harvard UP, 2014, lines 45–49, 46.

Wulfstan. “Sermo lupi ad Anglos.” In Dorothy Bethurum, ed. The Homilies of Wulfstan. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957, 261–66 at 263–64.

Photo credit: Adolph Edward Weidhaas, 1936. Wikimedia Commons. Library of Congress. Public domain image.

mine / undermine

Illumination of a medieval manuscript depicting the undermining of walls during the Siege of Jerusalem in 1187 C.E.; London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 12, fol. 40v.

26 March 2025

To undermine something is to destroy it through some surreptitious means, to subvert it, and undermine is one of those words whose etymology is readily apparent by examining its constituent elements, under + mine, originally a reference to the military tactic of digging under the walls of a fortification in order to collapse them.

The verb to mine dates to the early fourteenth century and comes from the Anglo-Norman verb miner, meaning to dig under something, such as a wall, in order to make it collapse. In English it quickly acquired an additional, more general sense of to dig, especially for minerals.

Here we see the verb phrase to mine under in the poem King Richard, which was probably written sometime before 1300 with a manuscript witness from c. 1330. The bulk of the poem appears in the Auchinleck Manuscript but is incomplete there. This portion is from a fragment in a manuscript in the Edinburgh University library:

Wiþ þat þe galeyes com to þe cite
& hadde neyȝe won entre
Þai hadde so mined vnder þe walle
Þat mani a griffoun gan doun falle.

(With that the galleys came to the city
& had nearly won entry
They had so mined under the walls
That many a siege tower began to fall down.)

But the verb to undermine itself is first recorded in its figurative sense in an account of the Passion of Christ in the South English Legendary, a medieval collection of saint’s lives. The manuscript in which it appears was copied prior to 1325 and the particular version was written around 1280:

Þat ȝif þe hosebonde wiste    þe tyme & þe stounde
Whanne þe þeof wolde come    wake he wolde ffor to him ffounde
And nolde him soffry nou3t    his hous to vndermyne.

(If the husband knew the time and the moment when the thief would come, he would wake to find him. And he would not suffer his house to be undermined.)

The literal sense of digging under a fortification is recorded in a pre-1382 Wyclifite translation of the Bible, specifically Jeremiah 51:58:

These thingus seith the Lord God of ostus, The wal of babilon he the heist with vndermynyng shal ben vndermyned, and his heȝe ȝatus shul be brend with fyr.

(These things say the Lord God of hosts: the wall of Babylon, it is the highest, with undermining shall be undermined, and its high gates shall be burned with fire.)

The Vulgate version of this passage uses the verb suffodere, to dig under, to pierce from below. The fact that the figurative sense predates the literal means little. We just don’t have a surviving example of the literal usage that is older—when it comes to dating words from medieval manuscripts, differences of a few decades usually aren’t significant.

In English, the military senses of both undermine and mine existed throughout the medieval period, but in the early seventeenth century the verb to mine ceased being used in the military sense and came to only mean to dig, to excavate.

Modern landmines and sea-mines are also from the same linguistic root. Often, once a tunnel was dug underneath a castle’s walls, explosives, or mines, would be placed in it and detonated, bringing the walls down. The “breach” in the walls of Harfleur that Shakespeare’s Henry V charged “once more into” was created by just such a mine. This sense of mine eventually evolved into any buried or submerged explosive.

Knowing the etymology of this word has one additional advantage. If you’ve ever played the old board game Stratego and wondered what the miner was doing on the battlefield, now you know.

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Sources:

Anglo-Norman Dictionary, 2012, s.v. miner1, v.

The Holy Bible, Containing the Old and New Testaments with the Apocryphal Books, in the Earliest English Versions Made from the Latin Vulgate by John Wychiffe and His Followers, vol. 3 of 4. Josiah Forshall and Frederic Madden, eds. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1901, Jeremiah 51:58, 467. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

King Richard, lines 309–12. Edinburgh University Library MS 218, E fol. 3vb.

Middle English Dictionary, 8 February 2025, s.v. minen, v., underminen, v.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, March 2002, s.v. mine, v.; second edition, 1989, s.v. undermine, v.

The Southern Passion. Beatrice Daw Brown, ed. Early English Text Society, O.S. 169. London: Oxford University Press, 1927, 525–27, 19. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Image credit: London, British Library, Yates Thompson MS 12, fol. 40 v. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

groove / in the groove / groovy

24 March 2025

Most of us probably associate the slang word groovy with 1960s counterculture, but it’s considerably older than that, with the slang sense arising in 1930s jazz jargon. And the metaphorical sense of groove is even older.

Groove was borrowed from the Dutch groeve in the fifteenth century. It is cognate with the noun grave, as a place of burial, which traces back to Old English and on to a common Germanic root. Groove originally meant a mine shaft or pit, but by the mid seventeenth century, the meaning of groove had widened to refer to a channel through which something could flow or slide. And by the turn of the twentieth century, the spiral cuts in a phonograph cylinder or record were being called grooves, a development that probably influenced the jazz senses of the word.

Groove acquired the figurative sense of a routine action, a way of life, a “rut” by the mid nineteenth century. We see this figurative use in Alfred Tennyson’s 1842 poem Locksley Hall in a passage extolling the virtues of progress in the Victorian Age:

I that rather held it better men should perish one by one,
Than that earth should stand at gaze like Joshua's moon in Ajalon!

Not in vain the distance beacons. Forward, forward let us range.
Let the peoples spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.

This sense of a figurative groove by which something can travel appears in the world of sports writing by the 1920s. Here is an example of a baseball pitch being in the groove from the 9 March 1927 issue of the Sioux Falls, South Dakota Daily Argus-Leader:

When Babe Ruth comes to bat at a critical time in a tight baseball game what does the opposing pitcher do? Does he send one right “in the groove” where the famous slugger can put in his healthiest wallop? Assuredly not. He either walks Ruth, or tries to put one across where it is hardest for the home run king to swing.

Or this one from the world of golf in the 25 August 1927 issue of the Atlanta Journal by golf writer O. B. Keeler:

Big Bob Jones said later that in his opinion that putt was the best shot he ever had seen Bobby play. Certainly he has played few, if any, of greater importance. He had even more of a sidehill track than his opponent. He borrowed approximately three feet from the slope, and the ball, struck with exemplary firmness and crispness, took the curve as if in a groove and went into the middle of the cup as if drawn by a magnet.

The phrase in the groove moved from sports to other human endeavors, as is witnessed by this 5 March 1928 advertisement in Ohio’s Columbus Dispatch for a bank:

In a Groove

When a golfer; a tennis player, a trapshooter, or any other sportsman gets into his stride—in a streak of winning—he says he is “in a groove.” He just feels as if he cannot fail. Peculiar, isn’t it?

And then he gets into a groove of losing. He just feels he cannot win. Peculiar, isn’t it?

Some people are like that in money matters. Some are in a groove of spending—and some are in a groove of saving. Many are in a groove of depositing with us at 6%. There’s nothing peculiar about that.

The Brunson Bank & Trust Co.

And Keeler returns on 24 June 1932 with this use of the verb to groove:

Gene put in a good many hours, split up into thirty-minute periods, swinging that double-weight driver.

“You can’t hit with it,” he said. “You have to swing it, I think it tends to groove my swing, and to give me control of the wallop, when I’m using my regular club. Of course I may be wrong.

In a groove is attested to in a musical context in October 1932 by this quotation in the Oxford English Dictionary from the magazine Melody Maker:

Having such a wonderful time which puts me in a groove.

Four years later, in the 28 November 1936 issue of Melody Maker, this advertisement for Buescher trumpets and cornets ran:

EVERY TONE RIGHT “IN THE GROOVE”

Buescher “centered intonation” means exactly what it says. There is no cutting the corners—every tone is right “down the middle,” responds perfectly and accurately without favoring or forcing.

And the verb to groove, in a musical context, appeared in the November 1935 issue of Vanity Fair. This snippet is from a “sample” of jazz jargon, created by the article’s authors to show off various slang terms:

That’s the third date we’ve grooved half a dozen schmaltzy tunes for that wand-waver with never a swing item on the list.

And groovey is recorded in the journal American Speech in February 1937:

GROOVEY. Name applied to state of mind which is conducive to good playing.

The musical in the groove hit the big time in a profile of bandleader Benny Goodman in the 17 April 1937 issue of the New Yorker:

With the resurrection of true jazz, a new, richly expressive jargon has been developed which helps to explain just what swing is. The musical phrases which constitute a swing style are called licks, riffs, or get-offs. They are what a sender (hot star) or rideman (super-sender, creator of a style) gives when, feeling his stuff, he is in the groove and goes to town, or out of the world, or gets off on it.

And in October of the year, an article in American Speech defined the term as it was used in the New Yorker piece:

IN THE GROOVE. Play which is finished and of such quality as to be suitable for recording. A hot man is said to be in the groove if he is playing in his best style and ability. A band is in the groove if it is playing smoothly and in a well practiced fashion. This phrase applies to play anywhere, not only in the studio.

From there, in the groove and groovy persisted in musician slang until it blossomed in the counterculture of the 1960s. That’s how a fifteenth century borrowing from Dutch made its way to Woodstock.

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Sources:

“The Battle Is On.” Daily Argus-Leader (Sioux Falls, South Dakota), 9 March 1927, 6/2. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Buescher True Tone Trumpets & Cornets” (advertisement). Melody Maker, 28 November 1936, 12/1. Worldradiohistory.com.

Green’s Dictionary of Slang, n.d., groove, n.2, groove, v., groovy, adj.2.

Keeler, O. B. “This Game of Golf.” Daily Clarion-Ledger (Jackson, Mississippi), 24 June 1932, 15/4. ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

———. “Sudden Death Events Over with Von Elm a Casualty.” Atlanta Journal (Georgia), 25 August 1927, 12/1–2, Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

“In a Groove” (advertisement). Columbus Dispatch (Ohio), 5 March 1928, 10/7. Readex: America’s Historical Newspapers.

Nichols, E. J. and W. L. Werner. “Hot Jazz Jargon.” Vanity Fair, 45.3, November 1935, 38. Vanity Fair Archive.

Nye, Russel B. “A Muscian’s Word List.” American Speech, 12.1, February 1937, 45–48 at 46/2. JSTOR.

Oxford English Dictionary, second edition, 1989, s.v. groove, n., groove, v., groovy, adj.

Steig, Henry Anton. “Profiles: Alligators’ Idol.” New Yorker, 17 April 1937. 31–38 at 31/3. New Yorker Archive.

Tennyson, Alfred. “Locksley Hall.” In Poems, vol. 2 of 2. Boston: William D. Ticknor, 1842, 2:110. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Webb, H. Brook. “The Slang of Jazz.” American Speech, 12.3, October 1937, 179–184 at 184/1. JSTOR.

Photo credit: Gina B., 2013. Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

truthiness

21 March 2025

In today’s usage, truthiness is inextricably linked with comedian/talk-show host Stephen Colbert, who used the word on the premiere, 17 October 2005 episode of his television show The Colbert Report (2005–14). Truthiness, as used by Colbert, is the truth as we wish it to be, what we know in our gut as opposed to what we know in our brain. In the show, Colbert parodied television pundits who invent facts to support their opinions and ignore evidence that doesn’t. In the very segment in which he introduced the word, Colbert went on to give an example of how truthiness works:

And on this show, on this show your voice will be heard . . . in the form of my voice. 'Cause you're looking at a straight-shooter, America. I tell it like it is. I calls 'em like I sees 'em. I will speak to you in plain simple English.

And that brings us to tonight's word: truthiness.

Now I’m sure some of the word police, the wordinistas over at Webster’s are gonna say, “hey, that’s not a word.” Well, anybody who knows me knows I’m no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They’re elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn’t true. Or what did or didn’t happen. Who’s Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I wanna say it happened in 1941, that’s my right. I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.

Like the show on which it appeared, the word became a big hit. Most uses of truthiness have been in discussion of Colbert’s show, but there have been enough uses outside the context of the program to consider this sense of truthiness to be something more than a mere stunt word. The American Dialect Society named truthiness as the Word of the Year for 2005, as did Merriam-Webster for 2006.

Colbert, while clearly the source for the current definition and popularity of the word, is not the first to ever use truthiness. The word appears in John Wilson’s Noctes Ambrosianae #60, originally published in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine in February 1832, one of a long series of imaginary dialogues between a set of characters, both imaginary and based on real people, conducted in Ambrose’s Tavern in Edinburgh. But Wilson uses truthiness to mean truthfulness, faithfulness, not at all the same thing as Colbert’s usage:

I did not come here to hear you speak truth during the rest of the evening. You do not speak truth well, North; at the same time, I do not deny that you may possess very considerable natural powers of veracity—of truth-telling; but then, you have not cultivated them, having been too much occupied with the ordinary affairs of life. Truthiness is a habit, like every other virtue.

The word in this older sense also appears twice in the memoirs of Joseph John Gurney. The first, apparently penned in 1837, reads:

Truly may it be said, that her valuable qualities have been sanctified; whilst her play of character has not been lost, but has been rendered more interesting than before. Every one who knows her is aware of her truthiness, and appreciates her kindness.

And there is this from 5 August 1844, where he notes the irony that the contradictions in the Bible demonstrate the authenticity of the writing:

How delightful have the Scriptures been to me of late season! I have been struck with the truthiness which is so evident in their apparent contradictions. These are generally capable of being reconciled; they do indeed mark the genuineness and authenticity of the whole.

The word has undoubtedly been independently coined several times over the decades and centuries, but finding actual uses in print is a rare occurrence. So while truthiness, meaning the quality of being truthful, has been in occasional use of the last couple of centuries, Stephen Colbert can lay fair claim to coining the twenty-first century sense of the word.

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Sources:

Glowka, Wayne, et al. “Among the New Words.” American Speech, 81.2, Summer 2006, 180–202 at 199–200. DOI: 10.1215/00031283-2006-012.

Gurney, Joseph John. Memoirs of Joseph John Gurney, with Selections from His Journal and Correspondence, 2 vols. Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, ed. Philadelphia: Lippencott, Grambo, 1854, 1.252 and 2.443. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Oxford English Dictionary, third edition, December 2015, s.v. truthiness, n.

Wilson, John. “Noctes Ambrosianae, No. LX.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 31.190, February 1832, 255–88 at 272. HathiTrust Digital Archive.

Zimmer, Benjamin. “Truthiness or Trustiness?” Language Log, 26 October 2005.

Image credit: The Colbert Report, Comedy Central, 2005. Fair use of a low-resolution still image from the television to illustrate the topic under discussion.