Weekly Word: Truism

A truism is “a self-evident, obvious truth”. But more than that, it’s often a truth so obvious that it’s “hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device”, according to Wikipedia.

I guess a truism is like a maxim or axiom (a self-evident truth), but it just has a different connotation; one of its listed synonyms is cliché.

The word truism obviously comes from true and ism, but who decided to put the two together? Is the word really that useful? I guess truth must be an important concept, because we have so many words related to it, like trueness, truthfulness, and of course Stephen Colbert’s truthiness. And then there’s verity, veracity, verisimilitude, and probably many others.