In The Era of Truthiness
David R. Mark of Jabbs has a post on truthiness:
Truthiness reminds me of a debate more than twenty years ago among writers. There was one group of writers who said what matters is what's true. Another group of writers said what matters is what sounds good. For my taste, the second group was too often easy to see through when I read their work. But actually this is a complicated issue.
The best writers always use the heart and mind but they try to stick to the truth as they know it.
Plausible myths are one of the big dangers our society faces at the moment. Cultures need their mythologies but they need to make those mythologies real in a humane sense. A classic example in American culture would be the concept of democracy. Democracy is sort of a myth but most Americans, particularly moderates and liberals, want to make it real.
If you haven't heard of truthiness, it's defined as: "the quality of preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true, rather than concepts or facts known to be true."The rest of the Colbert quote in Mark's post is pretty funny.
Sound familiar? Perhaps because truthiness is so rampant in the spin the Bush Administration and its cohorts in the conservative media feed us daily. Maybe that's why truthiness was selected by the American Dialect Society as the word of the year for 2005.
Here's how Colbert, satirizing Bill O'Reilly, describes it:
COLBERT: And that brings us to tonight's word: Truthiness.
Now I'm sure some of the word-police, the "wordanistas" over at Websters, are gonna say, "Hey, that's not a word!" Well, anybody who knows me knows that I am no fan of dictionaries or reference books. They're elitist. Constantly telling us what is or isn't true, what did or didn't happen.
Who's Britannica to tell me the Panama Canal was finished in 1914? If I want to say it happened in 1941, that's my right.
I don't trust books. They're all fact, no heart. And that's exactly what's pulling our country apart today. Because face it, folks, we are a divided nation. Not between Democrats or Republicans, or conservatives and liberals, or tops and bottoms. No, we are divided by those who think with their head, and those who know with their heart.
Truthiness reminds me of a debate more than twenty years ago among writers. There was one group of writers who said what matters is what's true. Another group of writers said what matters is what sounds good. For my taste, the second group was too often easy to see through when I read their work. But actually this is a complicated issue.
The best writers always use the heart and mind but they try to stick to the truth as they know it.
Plausible myths are one of the big dangers our society faces at the moment. Cultures need their mythologies but they need to make those mythologies real in a humane sense. A classic example in American culture would be the concept of democracy. Democracy is sort of a myth but most Americans, particularly moderates and liberals, want to make it real.
posted by Poechewe at 5:42 PM
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