They’re playing Hangman over at Dictionary.com with an opportunity to win Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson’s Stranger Than Fiction.
Also on Dictionary.com, does this list of “Words of the Year 2006” tell us anything about our culture? The “Top 10 Looked-up Words” last year are love, affect, effect, good, beautiful, metaphor, integrity, experience, irony, and happy. From my scant research, integrity appears to be a perennially popular words for online dictionaries. I wonder if it and the words love, good, and beautiful reveal a yearning for meaning and purpose among internet users.
Maybe it just reveals a strain of schmaltz in me.
My sense (probably wrong) is that “integrity” has come to replace “goodness” in the hierarchy of society’s values. Since “integrity” means self-consistency, it follows in the contemporary view that it doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you aren’t hypocritical about it. If you are a cannibal, and an open and consistent cannibal, then you have “integrity” under the current understanding, and are a good person.
Integrity can be a great thing, but it’s not an absolute. It’s become an absolute in the relativist world, though.