Truthiness
"Truthiness" is a term popularized by Stephen Colbert as the subject of a feature called The Wørd, on the first episode of his satirical news commentary program The Colbert Report. As defined by Colbert, "truthiness" refers to the quality by which someone purports to know something emotionally or instinctively, without regard to evidence or to what the person might conclude from intellectual examination. By using the term as part of his satirical routine, Colbert seeks to critique the tendency to rely upon "truthiness".
Although Colbert did not coin the term, based as it is on a variation of the archaic term "truthy" in the Oxford English Dictionary, he has certainly introduced it to a mainsteam audience. "Truthiness" was selected as the 2005 Word of the Year by the American Dialect Society as a unique reflection of the year's zeitgeist. The New York Times also referred to the term as one of nine words that captured the spirit of 2005, while an etymology professor has predicted that the term as defined by Colbert will enter the English language to the degree that it will soon be included in English dictionaries.
Colbert's "truthiness"
On October 17, 2005, Colbert introduced the word "truthiness" in a monologue that emphasized its role as an ironic political polemic compressed into a single word, as demonstrated in the following excerpts:
- "I will speak to you in plain, simple English. And that brings us to tonight's word: 'truthiness'. Now I'm sure some of the 'word police', the 'wordanistas' over at Webster's are gonna say, 'Hey, that's not a word'. Well, anyone who knows me knows I'm no fan of dictionaries or reference books. ...
- "I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today. 'Cause face it, folks; we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats and Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided between those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart.
- "Consider Harriet Miers. If you 'think' about Harriet Miers, of course her nomination's absurd. But the president didn't say he 'thought' about his selection. He said this:
- (video clip of President Bush:) 'I know her heart.'
- "Notice he didn't say anything about her brain? He didn't have to. He 'feels' the truth about Harriet Miers.
- "And what about Iraq? If you 'think' about it, maybe there are a few missing pieces to the rationale for war. But doesn't taking Saddam out 'feel' like the right thing? ..."
Ironically, despite Colbert relying on the overtly anti-intellectual and invented nature of "truthiness" for its humorous effect, the term is actually included in the Oxford English Dictionary as a derived form of "truthy". The entry is marked as "rare or dialectal", with a single citation of "truthiness" dated to 1824 (though it has been posited that the citation actually dates to 1837, with an earlier citation dating to 1832 [1]). As such, Colbert seems to have unknowingly re-invented the word, though he also invented a new, ironic meaning for it, where the original meaning was a straightforward variant of "truthfulness". This distinction is consistent with the announcement by the American Dialect Society, in that it credits "truthiness" as "Recently popularized on the Colbert Report" rather than "invented".
Colbert gave a rare interview out of character with The Onion's A.V. Club, in which he responded to the question, "What's your take on the 'truthiness' imbroglio that's tearing our country apart?" by elaborating on the critique he intended to convey with the word "truthiness":
- "Truthiness is tearing apart our country, and I don't mean the argument over who came up with the word...
- 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? ...
- 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." [2]
The New York Times reports on "truthiness"
In its October 25 issue, eight days after the premiere episode of the Report, The New York Times ran its third article on The Colbert Report, penned by Alessandra Stanley, entitled "Bringing Out The Absurdity Of the News". [3] The article specifically discussed the segment on "truthiness", although the Times misreported the Word as "trustiness". In its November 1 issue, the Times ran a correction clarifying that the Word had been "truthiness", not "trustiness". On the next episode of the Report, Colbert took the Times to task for the error, pointing out (with ironic relish) that "trustiness" is "not even a word".
In its December 25 issue, the Times again discussed "truthiness", this time as one of nine words that had captured the year's zeitgeist, in an article entitled "2005: IN A WORD; TRUTHINESS" by Jacques Steinberg. In crediting "truthiness", Steinberg said, "the pundit who probably drew the most attention in 2005 was only playing one on TV: Stephen Colbert..." [4]
In the January 22 issue, columnist Frank Rich used the term "truthiness" seven times, with credit to Colbert, in a column entitled "Truthiness 101: From Frey to Alito", to discuss Republican portrayals of several issues (including the Alito nomination, Katrina response, and Murtha's wartime record). Rich emphasized the extent to which "truthiness" had quickly become a cultural fixture, saying, "The mock Comedy Central pundit Stephen Colbert's slinging of the word 'truthiness' caught on instantaneously last year precisely because we live in the age of truthiness." Editor & Publisher magazine reported on Rich's use of "truthiness" in his column, saying he "tackled the growing trend to 'truthiness,' as opposed to truth, in the U.S." [5]
The January 30 issue of the Times included an article entitled "How Oprahness Trumped Truthiness" by David Carr, although the article itself did not refer to "truthiness". Because the editors write the headlines in all stories for the Times, the "truthiness" reference was added by the editors to describe the theme of Carr's article. [6]
"Truthiness": the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year
In January 2006, the American Dialect Society announced that truthiness was selected as its 2005 Word of the Year [7]. The Society described their rationale as follows:
- 'In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. First heard on the Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Channel [sic], truthiness refers to the quality of stating concepts or facts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, "I don’t trust books. They're all fact, no heart."'
The press release was changed later on the website to:
- 'In its 16th annual words of the year vote, the American Dialect Society voted truthiness as the word of the year. Recently popularized on the Colbert Report, a satirical mock news show on the Comedy Central television channel, truthiness refers to the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true. As Stephen Colbert put it, “I don’t trust books. They’re all fact, no heart.” Other meanings of the word date as far back as 1824.'
This change was likely made to reflect the fact that word had existed prior to the October 17 show.
"Snub" by the Associated Press, and Colbert's response
The Associated Press reported on the American Dialect Society's selection of truthiness as the Word of the Year [8], including the following comments by one of the voting linguists:
- 'Michael Adams, a professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, said "truthiness" means "truthy, not facty." "The national argument right now is, one, who's got the truth and, two, who's got the facts," he said. "Until we can manage to get the two of them back together again, we're not going make much progress."'
On each of the first four episodes of the Report after the selection of truthiness as Word of the Year, Colbert lamented that news reports neglected to acknowledge him as the source of the word. On the first of these episodes, he added Michael Adams to his "On Notice" board, and Associated Press reporter Heather Clark, the author of the article, to his "Dead To Me" board [9]. On the third of these episodes, he ranked the AP at the top of the "Threat-Down" [10], one of few entries ever to gain the number one spot in place of bears. On the following episode he called Michael Adams and asked for an apology. Though Michael Adams never apologized, Colbert twisted Adams' words and "accepted" his "apology", and took him "off notice". Adams also pointed out that "truthiness" is in the Oxford English Dictionary.
The Associated Press responds to Colbert
In a strange case of life imitating art, on January 13, the first day after the four-day run of abuse of the AP on the Report, the AP ran a story about The Colbert Report being upset about being snubbed by the AP, in an article entitled "Colbert: AP the biggest threat to America". [11] As he has in the past, Colbert remained in character in an interview for the story, and used it to further the political satire of "truthiness"; excerpts of the story are as follows:
- "... When an AP story about the designation sent coast to coast failed to mention Colbert, he began a tongue-in-cheek crusade, not unlike the kind his muse Bill O'Reilly might lead in all seriousness.
- "'It's a sin of omission...' Colbert told The AP on Thursday. ... 'It's like Shakespeare still being alive and not asking him what "Hamlet" is about,' he said.
- "The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for 'truthy' dating back to the 1800s. ... 'The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all,' Colbert said Thursday. 'You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut.'
- "Though slight, the difference of Colbert's definition and the OED's is essential. It's not your typical truth, but, as The New York Times wrote, 'a summation of what (Colbert) sees as the guiding ethos of the loudest commentators on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.'
- "Colbert, who referred on his program to the AP omission as a 'journalistic travesty,' said Thursday that it was similar to the much-criticized weapons of mass destruction reporting leading up to the Iraq War. 'Except,' he said, 'people got hurt this time.'"
On January 14, Clark herself responded in an article entitled "EXCLUSIVE 'NEWS' -- I'm dead to Stephen Colbert". [12] She furthered the rise of "truthiness" in published English in conceding, "Truthiness be told, I never had seen 'The Colbert Report' until my name graced its 'Dead To Me' board this week. ... But I will say that I watched Colbert's show for the first time... It was funny. And that's not just truthy. That's a fact." On a less conciliatory note, she also voiced the opinions that "It's not like Stephen Colbert is a David Letterman or Jay Leno", "there's no way The Associated Press is a bigger threat to America than bears", and that the hundreds of Colbert fans concerned enough about "truthiness" to take the time to email her need to "get back to work... Who are you? Why are you wasting your time with this drivel?"
Additional attention to "truthiness"
In January 2006, just one day before its announcement as the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year, etymology professor Anatoly Liberman, who wrote Word Origins... and How We Know Them: Etymology for Everyone [13] (Oxford University Press, 2005) and who teaches a class called Honors: The Origin of English Words, began an hour-long program on public radio by discussing "truthiness" and predicting that it would be included in dictionaries in the next year or two. [14]
A few examples of additional blog commentary about the “truthiness”—AP story appeared on The Huffington Post under the heading, "Truthiness: Colbert Was Robbed!" [15]; on Althouse, in a post entitled "Truthiness and heart-feeling" [16]; "Truthiness and Consequentiality" on the B&C Beat [17]; and a post on the Daily Kos, which calls "truthiness" "one for our times". [18]
For a more detailed explanation of the idea behind truthiness, dictionary editor Steve Kleinedler recommends an article entitled "The Truthiness Hurts" [19], as noted by Benjamin Zimmer at Language Log [20].
The journal Editor and Publisher mentioned an "interesting bit of truthiness", without elaborating on the meaning of truthiness, in an article entitled "Stephen Colbert Spotlights North Carolina Paper". [21]
On the January 26, 2006 edition of Nightline, Truthiness was compared to the truth in the context of the Oprah Book Club controversy with the semi-fictional memoir A Million Little Pieces. Oprah Winfrey also discussed "truthiness" with Frank Rich on her show, in reference both to the James Frey controversy and the column "Truthiness 101" Rich had recently published in the New York Times. They also mentioned Colbert's role in popularizing "truthiness".[22]
On January 31, Arianna Huffington used "truthiness" on The Huffington Post in an allusion to President Bush: "Talk about your presidential dilemmas: Just as George Bush is preparing to offer up his 2006 State of the Union speech, America has suddenly developed a big time crush on the truth. And not just emotional truth or essential truth or even truthiness -- but actual, empirical, cut-the-crap truth." [23]
Independent observations relevant to truthiness
Colbert's definition of "truthiness" effectively encapsulates an observation by George Orwell: "We are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right."
The concept of truthiness also bears a considerable resemblance to Harry Frankfurt's definition of bullshit from his essay, On Bullshit. He argues that bullshitters misrepresent themselves to their audience not as liars do, that is, by deliberately making false claims about what is true. In fact, bullshit need not be untrue at all. Rather, bullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true.
In January 2006, a group of scientists led by Drew Westen announced their results of a study in which fMRI brain imaging showed that thirty self-described committed Democrats or Republicans, fifteen of each, used emotional areas of their brains when responding to facts that contradicted their favored presidential candidate, while the reasoning centers of their brains did not show indications of use. Specifically, when the Republican test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by George W. Bush, and when the Democratic test subjects were shown self-contradictory quotes by John Kerry, and asked to respond to them, both groups tended to explain away the apparent contradictions. While they did so, the fMRI scanners showed peaks in brain activity in areas such as the orbital frontal cortex, which regulates emotional processing, and the cingulate, which regulates forgiveness. At the same time, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is associated with rational thought, as well as conscious effort to ignore emotion, did not display activity.
As Dr. Westen said, "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged... Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want... Everyone... may reason to emotionally biased judgments when they have a vested interest in how to interpret 'the facts.'" [24] [25] [26]
