"Truthiness" means "truthy, not facty"

[MarkB]

A panel of U.S. lingquists has decided the word that bests reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts. Truthiness, means "truthy, not facty."

Huh?

MarkB

[fearfaoin]

Wow, reminds me of a Bushism.

SNL debate moderator: "Mr Bush, could you sum up your campaign in one word?"
SNL Bush portrayor: "Strategery."

[Dale]

A panel of U.S. lingquists has decided the word that bests reflects 2005 is "truthiness," defined as the quality of stating concepts one wishes or believes to be true, rather than the facts. Truthiness, means "truthy, not facty."

Huh?

MarkB

That term was coined by Stephen Colbert.

Dale

[The Weekenders]

Wow, reminds me of another Forum.

[MarkB]

So would the truthy be a mattery of facty? Tell me truthinessly.

MarkB

[peeplj]

I find the idea that there is a difference between the truth and the facts to be deeply disturbing and morally offensive.

You cannot have the truth if you do not have the facts, and the more facts you have the more of the truth you can potentially know.

If you have a "truth" that contradicts the facts, it is the "truth" which must be questioned. That's the part nobody seems to want to do anymore.

--James

[Martin Milner]

I find the idea that there is a difference between the truth and the facts to be deeply disturbing and morally offensive.

You cannot have the truth if you do not have the facts, and the more facts you have the more of the truth you can potentially know.

If you have a "truth" that contradicts the facts, it is the "truth" which must be questioned. That's the part nobody seems to want to do anymore.

--James

It's all so true - Homer Simpson

[Flyingcursor]

And exactly what is "true" about Betty Lou getting out tonight?

And what's more, it's true that red is the color (colour) that my baby wore.

[Mitch]

I find the idea that there is a difference between the truth and the facts to be deeply disturbing and morally offensive.

You cannot have the truth if you do not have the facts, and the more facts you have the more of the truth you can potentially know.

If you have a "truth" that contradicts the facts, it is the "truth" which must be questioned. That's the part nobody seems to want to do anymore.

--James

It's all so true - Homer Simpson

Yes it's all a bit of a cartoon at the moment.

All this stuff seems to stem from a couple of recent discoveries:

1. Chaos theory has shown us that there are a lot of situations where we can know the math but never know the answer e.g. the weather could be known if it was possible to capture the starting points of every single atom on earth. Ergo that truth will never be known.

2. It's been shown that self-organising systems (such as the human brain) work entirely on perception. i.e. they don't give a toss about the "truth".

3. Politicians, extremists and media organisations were told the above and really havn't looked back.

The effect of all this was to cast off the anchor that had us aproximately tethered via a "quest for the truth". And now we drift aimlessly in a sea of spin. (or is it "spin sealessly in a drift of aim"?)

Anybody got an anchor?
Spin-sickness tablets?

[I.D.10-t]

A panel of U.S. lingquists has decided the word....

I wish that they would have determined that it was a stupid sounding word that could have been replaced with existing words that already had a precise meaning. Maybe, in this way we could bring english back to normalcy (sic).

[BoneQuint]

There's a link video of Colbert's "Truthiness" down a bit on this page:
http://www.crooksandliars.com/2005/10/18.html

Or just go straight to the video:
Windows Media
Quicktime