Alex Eichler, “‘Truthiness’ Is Basically a Real Word Now” (The Atlantic Wire, Oct. 15, 2010)
This Sunday marks the five-year anniversary of the premiere of The Colbert Report, which means it will also be five years since Stephen Colbert first looked into a camera and intoned the word “truthiness.” This week, in the “On Language” column of The New York Times Magazine, Ben Zimmer looks back on a half decade of “truthiness”–the word, not the concept. Though Colbert says he plucked it out of the air, trying to find “a silly word that would feel wrong in your mouth,” the term has since been accepted into the mainstream American lexicon.
Read the rest here.