PresentTense:Merriam Webster, the dictionary publisher, has been running a poll on America's word of the year. The winner: "Truthiness". Don't bother looking it up, you won't find it. It's a made-up word, or at least one that has been newly created.
It was coined by American television satirist Stephen Colbert in 2005, who defined it as "truth that comes from the gut, not books". The truth that one prefers to believe over the reality of a situation.
Introduced in 2005, the word lampoons the wilful deafness of the American right, and its impressive ability to knead the English language as though it were plasticine. It also sounds like a word that might have already existed, but which has lain ignored in some dusty paragraph of the dictionary, waiting to be rediscovered. It strikes a certain note of . . . well, truthiness. For a comic to invent a word that has quickly slipped into the mainstream is some achievement. One worthy of true honourisation.
Colbert (the t is silent) is largely unknown here, but has become something of a household name in the US thanks to his on-screen persona as a combative, self-certain news anchor, an aping of Fox News's abusive, bull-headed types that mistake their own opinions for objective fact. His show, The Colbert Report, on Comedy Central, is a spin-off from Jon Stewart's Daily Show, in which he played the empty-headed but arrogant news reporter to Stewart's sceptical anchor. Flourishing from the grotesque nature of these times, as satirists do, Stewart and Colbert's "fake news" is occasionally lauded by some as more trustworthy than the real thing. In fact, there has been a half-serious campaign for Colbert to be made Time Magazine's Person of the Year. No comedian has received such an honour. Or at least, not since Henry Kissinger in 1972. And that was a double act with Richard Nixon, who was always a more natural clown.
Even if he's unlikely to be person of the year, it has certainly been Colbert's year. He was among Time Magazine's most influential 100 people. He topped a recent "media person of the year" poll. And truthiness wasn't his only gift to the lexicon.
With "wikiality", he married Wikipedia with reality to define a truth that comes about simply if enough people decide it is so.
Equally impressive is how his fans have been successful in getting his name grafted into the most unlikely of places. There was almost a Hungarian bridge named after him, only for bemused local authorities to reject his winning of the vote by invoking a small, but important, clause that required him to be dead to get a public structure named after him. However, thanks to another campaign, a Canadian junior league hockey team now has its eagle mascot named after him.
But Colbert's big night came in May when, at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner, he did what very many people across the world dream of doing: he insulted George W Bush. To his face. The insults, of course, came garlanded with punchlines. "I stand by this man," he said, gesturing towards the president. "I stand by this man because he stands for things. Not only for things, he stands on things. Things like aircraft carriers and rubble and recently flooded city squares."
Colbert has since said that he's unsure if the people who booked him knew that they were getting, not Stephen Colbert, but "Stephen Colbert", who would become Bush's character assassin by affecting to be his protector. "The greatest thing about this man is he's steady. You know where he stands," he said of Bush. "He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change; this man's beliefs never will." He added that Bush "obviously loves his wife, calls her his better half. And polls show America agrees."
Within two hours it was on YouTube. Within two days, it had been watched 2.7 million times. It was uncomfortable viewing; his humour slumped on unsure half-smiles and occasional, but obvious, glances of disgust. The Washington Post wrote that he was "not just a failure as a comedian, but also rude". But Colbert wasn't performing to a conference room of 2,700 people, but to several million people sitting in front of their computer screens, with their jaws hanging heavy on their keyboards.
Since that night, Colbert's been credited with influencing the mid-term elections, in which Bush presided over a Republican meltdown; although the ones who call Colbert influential tend to be those whose opinions were formed long ago. He and Stewart appeal largely to a demographic hugging the east and west coast of the US, so it's likely that Colbert only shepherds anti-Bush viewers further into the pen.
But their success has encouraged Fox News to develop its own right-leaning "fake news" show. That's a move as blind to irony as anything Colbert could manage. But it confirms something which has given succour to liberal minds during difficult times. That, even if they have been losing the culture war, at least they have the funniest soldiers.
