On the return of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” from winter vacation, the first word on its daily feature “The WØRD” was celebrated as the American Dialect Society’s 2005 Word of the Year: truthiness – “the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true”. I guess it is composed of “truthy” [truly likely] + -ness [the quality of being]. We do need a word for this concept, because similar words like “doublespeak”, “delusion”, or “duplicity” don’t quite get the innocent longing feeling or ironic contempt that “truthiness” possesses.
Clever by Half
