Yesterday I mentioned the Dictionary.com weekly list of words in the news.
Another word (in addition to yesterday’s ‘dingo’) is the verb ‘to tout’—which strikes me as an odd enough word to take a look at.
Here’s the context in which Diciionary.com found the word ‘tout’ this week: The CIA has announced that it will shut down its popular World Factbook website. Journalists, historians, librarians, and former agency officials have ‘touted’ the site as an important, reliable source of information about the world, praising it for providing accurate facts about governments, cultures, etiquette, religion, and more.
Once a classified document used only by CIA employees, the Factbook was made available to the public in book form in 1975 and moved online in 1997.
So, when journalists, librarians and others ‘touted’ this website, what were they doing?
According to the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English to ‘tout’ something means: ‘to praise something or someone in order to persuade people that they (or it) are important or worthwhile.’
And the Cambridge English Dictionary more or less agrees—to ‘tout’ they say means ‘to advertise, talk about, or praise something or someone repeatedly, especially as a way of encouraging people to like, accept or buy something.’
Well, much the same idea, I suppose.
The word is found in English from around 1400 and comes from a Germanic source word.
Then there’s the noun ‘tout’ and this has a much more unpleasant overtone.
We talk about a ‘racetrack tout’ as someone who claims to have inside knowledge (‘straight from the jockey’s mouth, mate’) which he will try to flog to any gullible buyer.
However, in the case of the news item cited by Dictionary.com something far nobler and more distinguished in in view—the notion of finding a good a reliable source of information and wanting to share that with others.
And now I’ve probably told you more about ‘tout’ than you ever wanted to know!
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