Truthiness

Although not yet in dictionaries, the word ‘truthiness’ is already commonly used by many English speakers.  It was first coined by popular American comedian Stephen Colbert on 17 October 2005 during his TV programme The Colbert Report as a means of describing the rhetoric of right-wing political figures who, he implied, repeatedly assert claims without regard for evidence, logic or facts.  As Colbert explained, ‘truthiness is what you want the facts to be, as opposed to what the facts are’. Colbert’s continued use of the terms is made all the funnier by his own truthiness; he is, after all, a liberal satirist pretending to be a conservative pundit.  Truthiness therefore turns out to be a serious kind of joke, a joke about truth and falsehood that is itself a lie, a lie one tells in order to reveal a greater truth that lies beneath it.

(Batchen, 2013, p. 3).