More Words About Words
Issue 248
I.
Although it might trigger a sigh and even some tears, there are times when a word is lost. Like a rebellious child who strays into a disreputable crowd, sometimes you just need to shake your head and close the door. Over the holidays we won’t even speak the word, sadly, because it is just too painful.
The word factoid is, in some ways, one of these lost and irretrievable words, condemned to a life without purpose. It is one of our most unfortunate words—a word that has strayed so far from home, so far from its original meaning, that when you hear it you’re never quite sure what a speaker intends.
Credit goes to Norman Mailer for the first citation of this word in his book Marilyn, but his definition—and it is worth thinking about the fame of Marilyn Monroe in this moment—identified a factoid as an invented truth. Not exactly a lie, not necessarily an exaggeration, but a statement that creates reality. To say that she was the most famous isn’t exactly a lie, although it is an opinion that’s dressed as a fact: in a factoid we have the creation of reality with language.
Everyone in Washington is talking about him; She’s likely to get the part; He’s the toast of two continents. These aren’t lies, they might even resemble something that’s close to accurate, and you can’t easily disagree—the claims are too loose, too elusive, they even sound like facts. There’s a clue in how the -oid suffix suggests something that’s synthetic, just as humanoid resembles human without being human, and opioid resembles opium without being opium.
Unfortunately, the word factoid is typically used to mean an unusual but interesting fact today. Obviously a better word for that exact same situation is simply the word fact. What’s tricky is that the old definition and the contemporary usage seem to conflict. But there’s no solution here except to give the word its freedom, allowing it to run like a feral child without language or education. At least there’s irony in how the word factoid is, in some ways, itself a factoid.
II.
Of course there’s nothing unusual about a bit of linguistic drift. It would be more unusual to have the language solidify in place—with the vocabulary and sentence structure and norms of previous centuries still used today. The culture creeps along, the environment isn’t static, our language tries to keep up. I would argue that this dynamic is part of what makes language so interesting, even though some changes are rather perplexing—such as when a word transforms into its opposite.
The infamous drift of the word literally to mean the word figuratively is one of the strangest changes. At this point the disease has spread enough that nobody can ignore it—in a search of recent articles and the word literally, I literally just looked through dozens of headlines from the last week with the word used in a performative, ironic way. It isn’t unusual to hear people say I will literally kill him or I literally had to fight my way home. Linguistic drift is perfectly fine—fascinating, really—but it is peculiar when what’s intended is exactly the opposite of what’s said.
Awful has undergone the same transformation but fewer people notice because the slippage occurred so long ago. Originally, the word meant ‘inspiring awe’, as in unbelievable sights that leave you astounded, rather than its contemporary meaning of terrible. Think biblical reverence rather than biblical fright. This is dramatic, a shift from one extreme to its opposite, and it’s curious to note that fewer people care about this shift because they weren’t around for the original definition. You can trace the same reversal with the word terrific: what once meant causing terror now means excellent, so you must, it seems, keep up with the times if you want to be understood.
III.
Interestingly, even though we’ve lost the word factoid, we’re certainly swimming in factoids. And when the concept remains—it demands a label. You can fiddle, massage, even censor, the language, but you can’t flee from the sensations that people perceive. Eventually a way to refer to the feeling will return.
For manufactured truths that aren’t exactly lies, you might say that we’re in a golden age, an age of swindlers and marketers and tricksters. So we’ve got spin, used in both politics and business, for the open way in which people attempt to massage facts in their favor; there’s the trite and tedious description of fake news, which means both fabricated stories and news that I disagree with; you’ll hear people discuss talking points openly and loudly, referencing the way in which they’ll discuss subjects before any questions are even asked; I happen to like message discipline, in how it combines the whimsical nature of a message with the military connotation of discipline, which refers to how a spokesperson will repeat, repeat, and repeat a talking point, until the public simply gives up, accepting the words as true; astroturfing is when a campaign from above looks like it comes from below, so that an invented truth looks organic; narrative capture is a useful one if you’re talking about the news media, which is explained by the four words of a much older media term, too good to check; but the most startling of these terms might be alternative facts, used without shame and perhaps accepted because of a combination of talking points and message discipline.
What’s fascinating is the amount of metaphors in these terms. Spin comes from spinning yarn, which is itself a metaphor for telling a long, fabricated story. Astroturfing obviously describes fake grass and contrasts the idea of grassroots support. These are metaphors piled atop metaphors, the original meaning so far away that you’re required to squint. I’m certain that we’ll keep inventing more, that we’ll need more words to occupy the space between truth and falsehood, in our contemporary world that’s filled with factoids.
“Of course there’s nothing unusual about a bit of linguistic drift.” Now explain brat, haha. RIP.