Do you remember the halcyon days of 2006? That golden era when all we had to worry about was the prospect of endless war, rather than a complete breakdown in the integrity of the federal government? One of the champions of the conservatism of that period was Stephen Colbert, a character played by comic Stephen Colbert and host of The Colbert Report. One of Colbert’s (the character, not the comic) ideological pillars was the notion of “truthiness,†i.e. the feeling that something is true, despite all evidence to the contrary. So zeitgeist-y was the word that the venerable Oxford English Dictionary made it the Word of the Year. This year, a suspiciously similar word was added to the OED: post-truth. Colbert (the comic, not the character) now hosts a network late-night show and took to the stage to rail against the neologism and the organization that has legitimized it, claiming that they’ve merely ripped him off. That certainly seems true, but maybe it’s just truthy?
