"fact" = stated notion, suggestion, or idea (even if untrue)

[Jonathan Lighter]

How 'bout, I reject the "claim" or "notion" or "suggestion" or "idea" ?

"Idea" in particular is pretty unfalutin'.

I believe other examples should be findable by searching for "What about the fact that...?"

So "fact" comes increasingly to embrace "nonfact" just as "novel" comes to embrace "nonfiction."

JL

Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU> wrote:
---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Laurence Horn
Subject: Re: "fact" = stated notion, suggestion, or idea (even if untrue)
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At 8:34 AM -0700 5/25/05, Jonathan Lighter wrote:
>This is absurdly common in speech, but it's hard to find an
>unequivocal example, one not attributable to a disagreement about
>what the facts really are.

How about the standard politician's disclaimer of the form "I
(categorically) deny/reject the fact that..."

Here are a couple of relevant cases off the internet:

We must reject the fact that these young American students will undergo an
aggressive brainwashing and indoctrinating process

I reject the fact that, just because I purchased something years ago, I am no
longer a customer.

Still I reject the fact that youth has not only waned, but that I'm way past
mid-life.

I deny the fact that consciousness is an *objective* property of
matter, just because you can not define a physical property,
measurable by an external apparatus, whose measure could determine
the degree of consciousness

Why do you think I deny the fact that my homeplanet will be destroyed? I don't
wanna hear about it and I don't think it will happen.

I deny the fact that flesh I'd never seen before has suddenly appeared oozing
out the edges of Spandex

Actually, the last one may be factive, amounting to "I falsely
deny...", but how could I omit it? But a lot of them aren't. I
remember about 30 years ago when I was working on the Kiparsky's
"FACT" paper (1968) and first came across a headline of this sort in
the Post or Daily News, but since then I've stopped noticing them. I
think it's partly because the appropriate alternative, "deny/reject
the proposition", is just too highfalutin, and others (like "claim"
or "statement") are inaccurate or misleading when the content hasn't
been overtly expressed.

Larry

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