Truthiness in the wild

Dave Wilton dave at WILTON.NET
Wed May 7 14:12:48 UTC 2008


I heard "truthiness" used in a non-Colbert context last evening. I don't
have an exact quote (we were standing in line at the "Free Speech Cafe" on
the UC Berkeley campus and I didn't have a notebook and pen at the ready.)
But the discussion among grad students was in the context of poetry
(specifically a discussion of the 16th century poets Wyatt and Surrey) and
concerned whether a poem grounded in the real-life experience of the poet
("truth") was less emotionally effective to the modern reader than one
wholly fictional, but feigning autobiography ("truthiness").

No mention of Colbert was made.

--Dave Wilton

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