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In the article On Language, Ben Zimmer examines the birth, rise and continuing popularity of the silly sounding word, truthiness. It was coined by Stephen Colbert on his show segment, the word in 2005 and has reached far further then he had probably ever predicted. The word's meaning stems from its root 'truth' but something not always necessarily factual, referring to things people want to be true rather than the actual facts. This past year the word was even entered in the latest edition of the New Oxford American Dictionary. Not only has this word spread, but the use of the suffix -iness, has found popularity, being used in Los Angeles Times in the word 'fame-iness' and even in a book title named 'proof-iness.' The word now even has it's own software to detect the propagation of political misinformaiton on Twitter, where posts are distinguished as either reliable or merely 'truthy.'

A big help to it's spread was social media websites such as Twitter and Facebook. Also the word's popularity could show the importance and validity we put in comedic media, such as the Colbert report. This is significant in that the fun pronunciation of the word has brought attention to an important issue in politics, where how strongly people feel and care to support an issue has shown to seem more valuable than actual fact. More than just a fun word, it's play on irony brings awareness for close critical thinking as to what is said in politics and the news, and how different someone's truth and actual fact can be, and can now be measured by truthiness.