In the palace of truth

You know how they say the Eskimos have 18 words for snow? Well, we Americans probably have about that many words for truth. After all "Truthiness" was selected by the American Dialect Society as the 2005 Word of the Year.

There was a meeting at work last week where a senior manager kept referring to "the palace of truth" when talking about company policy. I think "in reality" would have sufficed, but I guess you kind of bold and italicize when you say "the palace of truth" .

Of course there's the 80-20 rule of truth. RULE: As long as 75-80% of the truth is told then it can officially be labeled "truth" by the FDA or whatever agency handles that kind of thing. I witnessed the 80-20 rule the other day in P.B. when a colleague of mine was on his cell phone describing the day as, "Absolutely perfect, it's 70 degrees, tons of people and we're just watching the waves roll in." Well, that was almost true except that it was completely overcast and a homeless man just took a pee on the sidewalk in front of us.

Today I was reminded that maybe all of this truth stuff or lack thereof isn't really that new. I was intrigued by an exhibition that I saw today at the Getty Center, "Agitated Images: John Heartfield and German Photomontage, 1920-1938". Heartfield took photos from newspapers etc. and transformed them to disclose the "truth" that was being obscured by the mainstream press.
I'm starting to think that the palace of truth may be hard to find, especially since I looked up those 18 Eskimo words for snow and found out it was just a hoax.