"You look it up in your gut"

I was one of those who was a little doubtful that "The Colbert Report" could go the distance. I'll admit it.

And, truth be told, I still give the interviews--and everything after "The Word," actually--a big miss.

But you gotta give them credit: They've fastened themselves like a lamprey onto the flank of the zeitgeist. In fact, as many of you know by now, "truthiness" was voted the 2005 word of the year by the American Dialect Society. (You can see the whole list in .pdf format, including lexicographical also-rans and winners from past years, here.)

And Team Colbert is shrewd enough to milk it for everything it's worth, even to the point of ginning up a pseudo-scandal that got AP coverage. Good for them.

Etymological sidebar: One of the nominated words on the ADA's 2005 list, although it apparently didn't make the final cut, is "dirka dirka," defined as:

a mimicry of spoken Arabic; also attributive, connoting things Muslim, Arabic, or Middle Eastern, or those related to terrorists or terrorism

--thus making it, in all likelihood, the only word on the ADS's list of nominees this year that began life as a "South Park" joke.

A tidbit I picked up during my time in the presence of classicists is that the English word "barbarian" comes from a bit of onomatopoeia in ancient Greek: The Arabs spoke a language that sounded to the linguistically-snobbish Greeks like "bar-bar-bar-bar . . . ", hence the word barbaros, which meant "foreigner," but also carried the hint of "uncouth outsider."

Do you suppose that, by now, Arabs are getting a little tired of monolingual Westerners coining words that make fun of how their language sounds to them, as opposed to, say, actually learning it?

Could be.

(Thanks to Kerri for tipping me off to the original ADS story.)