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From New York City, this is Lexicon Valley, a podcast about language.

I'm John McWhorter, and today I want to talk about truth.

What happens to truth?

You can think about truth and true and tree.

You know that tree comes from the same root as true.

It's all about being straight and straight up and true, true like a tree.

What happens to truth?

And, you know, this is not a philosophy podcast.

You know, there's so many podcasts that I assume there must probably be hundreds of philosophy podcasts.

This is not one of them. And this isn't a podcast

about intellectual history. I'll bet there aren't as many of those, but this is not one of those either.

This is supposed to be about linguistics. And so what I'm calling truth in that portentous way

as kind of a substitute for opening music for this monologue really is about words like true.

Words like true, like true itself, or real or actual, what happens to those words?

Because something does happen to those words.

And it's actually a very interesting thing.

All sorts of careers that you could either say those

words choose or really the careers are chosen for them, kind of the way in some countries, people

are shunted down certain tracks quite deliberately when they hit something like 13 or 14.

True and real and actual and literal. We're going to get to that, those words are chosen for certain careers,

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