New light on "truthiness"

[Laurence Horn]

At 1:07 PM -0500 1/16/06, Benjamin Zimmer wrote:
>I just wrote up a Lang Log post on our old friend "truthiness" as it
>appears in the work cited by OED, _The Memoirs of Joseph John Gurney_
>(Joseph Bevan Braithwaite, 1854):
>
>http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/002764.html
>
>OED has apparently erred in giving a date of 1824-- on closer
>inspection, the cite provided actually looks to be from 1837. Also,
>Gurney used the word again in 1844. But I can't find any other
>pre-Colbert uses in print. Can anyone find other attestations?
>
No, but (besides noting that this find does seem to suggest that the
OED cites may in some cases be more truthy than true) I am starting
to wonder exactly what "truthy" and "truthiness" were doing in the
lexicon (to the marginal extent that they were in there in the first
place) in those pre-Colbert age before "truthiness" came to stand for
(as one of its election-night supporters, Larry Hauser, put it) 'faux
truth'.  One point I thought worth making is that it's not "truth"
that the older "truthiness" alternated with but "truthfulness";
similarly, "truthy" seems to have been closer to "truthful" back then
than to "true".  The Colberty  "truthiness", on the other hand, is
more like "true", only less so.

Larry

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