>The word that bugs me is "truism". People say "that is a truism" when they could just say "that is true"

But they don't mean quite the same thing. Again from wikipedia (because it was the first hit):

"A truism is a claim that is so obvious or self-evident as to be hardly worth mentioning, except as a reminder or as a rhetorical or literary device.

<snip>

Often the word is used to disguise the fact that a proposition is really just a half-truth or an opinion, especially in rhetoric. "

Tamar