Is that news or gnos?
This morning I am seeing reports that Kash Patel will be named as acting head of the ATF. When? Oh, sometime next week. Probably.
I think that would be a good thing, but as someone used to say, I’ll believe it when I see it.
It reminded me that for a while now, it’s bothered me that the name news is too often applied, not to reports of what has happened, but to predictions of what will happen.
Those are very different kinds of things, and we need different names to be able to tell them apart.
As Confucius noted, the first step towards wisdom is to call things by their right names.
(It’s a little like when Obama was given a Nobel Prize because it was hoped that he would do something to earn it. So it should have been called something like the Nobel Peace Prompt, rather than the Nobel Peace Prize.)
I’m going to suggest that we use the word news to describe events in the present or immediate past, while using the word gnos (sounds like ‘knows’, short for ‘prognostication’) to describe what a writer predicts will happen in the near future.
For example, reports that Kash Patel has been confirmed as head of the FBI would be news, so you can file that fact away in your head as information; while reports that Kash Patel will be named acting head of ATF would be gnos, so you can assign that prediction the same level of confidence that you would give to stock tips and horoscopes.
Is there a better word than gnos? Perhaps. Probably. I’m certainly open to suggestion. But we need to have some word, to help people distinguish between fact and fiction. The modern world is confusing enough as it is, without inviting news outlets to report on what may be, unencumbered by what has been.
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