Heavens to Murgatroyd, what a weighty dispute! It all started from the AP story I discussed Saturday:
In October, on [Stephen] Colbert’s debut episode of the “Daily Show” spinoff, the comedian defined “truthiness” as truth that wouldn’t stand to be held back by facts. The word caught on, and last week the American Dialect Society named “truthiness” the word of the year.
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. [Aside: That’s funny.] …
Michael Adams, a visiting associate professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, pointed to [the Oxford English Dictionary’s] definition and has said Colbert’s claim to inventing the word is “untrue.” (Adams served as the expert opinion in the initial AP story.)
“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.”
Sounds like navel-gazing ? which might explain the word’s popularity among leftist blogs. Nevertheless, I prefer the New York Times’ rendition of Colbert’s definition over the Buffy-the-lexicographer?sounding “truthy, not facty”: “a summation of what (Colbert) sees as the guiding ethos of the loudest commentators on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN.”
Apparently it’s a combination of ipse dixit and argument via sputo, so for the LR, let’s call it ipse sputat.
