Truthiness will not die

[Benjamin Zimmer]

On 1/27/06, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> "Oprah strikes a blow for truthiness" ?
>
>   Isn't that a stupidism for "Oprah strikes a blow *against* truthiness" ?

Sure seems that way. The headline writer must not get the nuances of truthiness.

Speaking of those nuances, here's Stephen Colbert ruminating on them
in an interview with The Onion's AV Club (a serious interview, despite
the generally satirical nature of both Colbert's show and The Onion):

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http://www.avclub.com/content/node/44705

The A.V. Club: What's your take on the "truthiness" imbroglio that's
tearing our country apart?

Stephen Colbert: Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't
mean the argument over who came up with the word. I don't know whether
it's a new thing, but it's certainly a current thing, in that it
doesn't seem to matter what facts are. It used to be, everyone was
entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not
the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything.
It's certainty. People love the president because he's certain of his
choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to
exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a
certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the
American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or
what is true?

AVC: You're saying appearances are more important than objective truth?

SC: Absolutely. The whole idea of authority—authoritarian is fine for
some people, like people who say "Listen to me, and just don't
question, and do what I say, and everything will be fine"—the sort of
thing we really started to respond to so well after 9/11. 'Cause we
wanted someone to be daddy, to take decisions away from us. I really
have a sense of [America's current leaders] doing bad things in our
name to protect us, and that was okay. We weren't thrilled with Bush
because we thought he was a good guy at that point, we were thrilled
with him because we thought that he probably had hired people who
would fuck up our enemies, regardless of how they had to do it. That
was for us a very good thing, and I can't argue with the validity of
that feeling.

But that has been extended to the idea that authoritarian is better
than authority. Because authoritarian means there's only one
authority, and that authority has got to be the President, has got to
be the government, and has got to be his allies. What the right-wing
in the United States tries to do is undermine the press. They call the
press "liberal," they call the press "biased," not necessarily because
it is or because they have problems with the facts of the left—or even
because of the bias for the left, because it's hard not to be biased
in some way, everyone is always going to enter their editorial
opinion—but because a press that has validity is a press that has
authority. And as soon as there's any authority to what the press
says, you question the authority of the government—it's like the
existence of another authority. So that's another part of truthiness.
Truthiness is "What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says
could possibly be true." It's not only that I feel it to be true, but
that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but
there's a selfish quality.
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--Ben Zimmer

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The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org