we love stephen...

colbert... and that's the truthy truth. and when i say "we", i mean, of course, "mommy". and when i say "love", i mean "mommy thinks he's pretty freakin' funny". it's curious to note that she wasn't so sure she was gonna like his tongue-in-cheek-conservative-talk show after the first few times it aired, she and daddy both thought colbert was maybe trying a bit too hard and was gonna wind up tongue-in-cheek-conservative-talking himself into a scary dark corner with no hope of escape. but, since she and daddy are such huge fans of the daily show, and had laughed and laughed and laughed all the way through their coverage of the last presidential election, they decided to give the colbert report time to find its groove. boy are they glad they did. mommy was hysterical this morning after watching a repeat airing of an exchange that's described nicely in the article below, which mommy pretty much lifted from cnn.com:

Stephen Colbert on a Crusade
AP overlooks him for 'truthiness'? Watch out

NEW YORK (AP) -- Stung by a recent Associated Press article that didn't credit him for coining the word "truthiness," Comedy Central's Stephen Colbert has struck back.

On Wednesday evening, Colbert placed the AP atop the Threat Down segment of "The Colbert Report" show. What was No. 2?

Bears.

In October, on Colbert's debut episode of the "Daily Show" spinoff, the comedian defined "truthiness" as truth that wouldn't stand to be held back by facts. The word caught on, and last week the American Dialect Society named "truthiness" the word of the year.

When an AP story about the designation sent coast to coast failed to mention Colbert, he began a tongue-in-cheek crusade, not unlike the kind his muse Bill O'Reilly might lead in all seriousness.

"It's a sin of omission, is what it is," Colbert told The AP on Thursday. "You're not giving people the whole story about truthiness."

"It's like Shakespeare still being alive and not asking him what 'Hamlet' is about," he said.

The Oxford English Dictionary has a definition for "truthy" dating back to the 1800s. It's defined as "characterized by truth" and includes the derivation "truthiness."

Michael Adams, a visiting associate professor at North Carolina State University who specializes in lexicology, pointed to that definition and has said Colbert's claim to inventing the word is "untrue." (Adams served as the expert opinion in the initial AP story.)

"The fact that they looked it up in a book just shows that they don't get the idea of truthiness at all," Colbert said Thursday. "You don't look up truthiness in a book, you look it up in your gut."

Though slight, the difference of Colbert's definition and the OED's is essential. It's not your typical truth, but, as The New York Times wrote, "a summation of what (Colbert) sees as the guiding ethos of the loudest commentators on Fox News, MSNBC and CNN."

Colbert, who referred on his program to the AP omission as a "journalistic travesty," said Thursday that it was similar to the much-criticized weapons of mass destruction reporting leading up to the Iraq War.

"Except," he said, "people got hurt this time."

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ya just can't make this stuff up. oh wait... maybe you could. but, when there are folks around like stephen colbert who are wa-ay funnier than you and/or me, why would ya want to?