January 25, 2006
Faithiness
“Truthiness,” says a panel of linguists, is the neologism that best reflects 2005 in general. They define it as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than simply stating the facts.
Not to be left behind and to keep the church altogether relevant, we Anglicans have come up with “faithiness,” our own new 2005 word that means the quality of stating concepts one wishes were so but aren’t. Faithiness might be taken to mean faithy, but not necessarily faithful. Furthermore, we went to great length and expense in what we’ve called the Windsor Report (a so very quaintly and appropriately British name) to do this.
Now one needn’t anticipate actually to find the word in the Report or go searching for it. It’s only there by the kind of subtle nuance and implied clarity so very typical of Anglicanism. But we do expect the word to catch on anyhow and perhaps even be a way of avoiding — for those with any sense of irony at all — the severe kind of confrontation so common to all those Reformation sects who took themselves so seriously as to overlook what they might first have looked over had they been more attentive.