Word of the Year

One of my thoughts on New Year’s Resolutions this year was to post to my blogspace here at MyMac on a regular basis, as I have given up on trying to correct my myriad of bad habits by resolution, one of which I’m not ashamed to admit is an occasional satisfaction of my unhealthy craving for biscuits and gravy. (I am ashamed to admit the others.) I thought perhaps it would be good instead to develop some healthy habits to create balance and harmony with the bad ones. Writing takes discipline. Discipline would be a good thing for me to develop. We’ll see how long this lasts. Bad habits are so much easier to maintain.

I bought iPods for my kids for Christmas which was the first time I’d ever seen or held one, and I admit that lust overcame me, although I don’t know what I’d use one for. My taste in music is limited. The drive between work and home is too short to listen to a podcast. Workdays my time is consumed with Very. Important. Business. Decisions, and evenings and weekends are spend either in quiet at-home time with the husband, or in raucous play with the grandbrats. The iPod is a thing of grace and beauty, and podcast was listed as the most useful word of 2005 by a panel of US linguists. I don’t know if that is reason enough for me to rush out and buy one, as the act of lusting for then indulging lust is one of my bad habits, so purchasing the iPod would instill unnecessary guilt for indulging yet another bad habit therefore creating the need to think up and develop yet another good habit to create balance and harmony, which I am not sure I have time for. I guess for now I’ll pass on the iPod purchase.

I found that little tidbit about the most useful word of the year in this article. I found their selection of Word of the Year quite interesting.

“A panel of US linguists has decided the word that best reflects 2005 is “truthiness”, defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts.

Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State University who specialises in lexicology, said “truthiness” means “truthy, not facty”.

“The national argument right now is, one, who’s got the truth and, two, who’s got the facts,” he said. “Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we’re not going to make much progress.”

Truthiness is much like a bad habit I reckon; easy to indulge in, difficult to admit, and hard to break. It is one of the reasons I no longer react to potentially inflammatory articles I read on the internet. I like truth and facts, but truth and facts are easily distorted. I spent much of 2005 in the realm of non-belief and non-reaction, the end result being that I had nothing to say. Which is one reason why I need to discipline myself to begin to write again.

I will not be offering up helpful advice on Macintosh computers, other than the occasional aside such as how I’m so ignorant I didn’t even know there was a keyboard illumination button on my powerbook which my grandson must have deactivated without my knowing which instigated a search in the Help menu, a google search, and culminating in a humiliating “help me” email to the mailing list. (The F10 key turns it back on. I kept hitting F2, didn’t even THINK to look on the other side of the keyboard. So much for me being intuitive.) But I will try to be interesting. Stay tuned.