Ask, and ye shall receive.

truthiness (n.): 1. the quality by which something is believed emotionally without regard to evidence or rational thought. 2. (non-standard, jocular) the quality of adhering to incorrect concepts one wishes or believes to be true. Used as previous.

The history of “truthiness” is, by now, well-documented if not downright well-known. The Colbert Report, Comedy Central’s The Daily Show spinoff that satirizes both the rhetorical style and political perspective of Bill O’Reilly and the elaborate, contrived structure of his show The O’Reilly Factor, came into this world fully formed, as if springing from the head of Zeus himself. Among the regular features that debuted on October 17, 2005 was “The WØRD,” a segment in which the show’s auteur, Stephen Colbert, trots out a new lexeme every episode and goes on a tirade about it. (It’s a segment very close to my heart.)

Colbert came barreling out of the gate in that first episode with the word “truthiness,” a term not technically of his own coinage (it existed previously as an archaic word meaning “truthfulness,” supported by an OED citation*) but which has since gone on to take a prominent place in the lexicon and, dare I say it, the zeitgeist of the American republic. This was enshrined last year when the American Dialect Society voted “truthiness” its 2005 Word of the Year (albeit using what I consider an inferior definition that seems to describe primarily people rather than statements: “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true.” The definition at the head of this post is adapted from Wiktionary, which I don’t ordinarily like, but which is necessarily among the best resources for defining a new word with limited usage history).

Earlier today, the incomparably sharp Kevin C wrote a blistering critique of unsound metaphors in discourse outside of an artistic context, denigrating them as being no more or less than abject lies. And bully for him: as a songwriter, I consider the convoluted, poorly-expressed metaphor the exclusive province of those of us deliberately attempting to allow the listener (or reader) to impose whatever interpretation they desire upon our words. The L.A. Times staff writer Kevin quotes is not one of us.

Kevin brings up a good point in his footnote about whether “truthiness” has inherent value or whether its widespread use is a result of the media circus that has surrounded it. It’s a question that has fostered some debate among members of the American Dialect Society itself. To me, though, there is no doubt: “truthiness” describes a very real, if somewhat recently observed, concept for which no other extant word can stand.

2005 was a landmark year for the definition of truth manipulation in American society, because while regular, public, nefarious distortions had been going on since the advent of the Bush Administration in 2001, I would argue that their true nature was not clearly understood until the publication of On Bullshit by Harry G. Frankfurt early that year. (Full disclosure: I haven’t read this book. I’ve only seen Professor Frankfurt interviewed on — where else? — The Daily Show, on March 14, 2005. However, many people understand that this does not mean I cannot legitimately talk about the book.)

One of the key distinctions Frankfurt makes in On Bullshit is between bullshit and lying. To lie, one must understand the facts in order to obfuscate them. To bullshit, one’s understanding of the facts is immaterial, because bullshit is about the telling of a cohesive narrative without regard to the veracity of the statements contained therein. Frankfurt argues that, for this reason, bullshit is far more dangerous than lying, because bullshit demeans the truth and reduces the value society places upon truth, whereas lying by its very nature acknowledges that the truth is important.

During his interview, Jon Stewart asked Frankfurt about the relationship between political spin and bullshit, and Frankfurt declined to answer, saying he had given it a lot of thought but hadn’t come to a conclusion. Enter Stephen Colbert. Colbert recognized, somewhere between Frankfurt’s appearance on The Daily Show and the debut of The Colbert Report, that an essential component of the way George W. Bush in particular executed his administration’s brand of spin was by basing his rhetoric not on fact, which allows for refutation and argument, but on belief, which does not.** Bush and his subordinates turned lying into bullshit by substituting for truth that singular category of expression Colbert defined as “truthiness.”

I suppose this is a long-winded way of saying that yes, truthiness is not only a valid and inherently valuable word, but an insightful coinage that describes a phenomenon only recently addressed by academia but which pervades (and threatens) our everyday lives. I can think of few other neologisms that could stake such an irrefutable claim to a place in the permanent lexicon.

* 1824 J. J. GURNEY in Braithwaite Mem. (1854) I. 242 Everyone who knows her is aware of her truthiness.
** Fellow Brunonians may also recognize this style of argumentation from campus, where the populace tended to preface statements of opinion or even of fact with the phrase “I feel like,” thus taking the sentence out of the realm of factual discussion that can be refuted by evidence and into the realm of truthiness, where a speaker can always fall back on the defense that a statement is just his or her belief.