Birth of a nova--not?

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:56 AM -0500 1/19/06, RonButters at AOL.COM wrote:
>In a message dated 1/18/06 8:32:18 PM, AAllan at AOL.COM writes:
>
>
>>  New revelations about James Frey's partly made-up best-selling memoir about
>>  his addiction to alcohol and crack and arrests make "truthiness" sound
>>  timely
>>  and downright prophetic. Frey admitted last week that he embellished some
>>  details of his life in "A Million Little Pieces," such as serving time in
>>  prison.
>>
>
>Nah, TRUTHINESS is not a lexicological nova, it is a cute, stunt-wordy flash
>in the lexicographical pan and will go the way of BUSHLIPS, and about as
>quickly.
>
>There is an old word for what Frey did: VERISIMILITUDE. Come to think of it,
>that is pretty much what TRUTHINESS means (though admittedly not totally).
>
>I am skeptical about predicitions that TRUTHINESS has much of a future. Not
>only is it doing the same work as VERISIMILITUDE, but it is not all that easy
>to recognize it morphosemantically as distinct from TRUTHFULNESS or
>TRUENESS--this is why so many people intitially reacted to it as a
>silly word: they saw
>it as a mere (pretentious) variant of one of those established words. If
>HAPPINESS means 'the state of being happy' and SILLINESS means 'the
>condition of
>being silly' and RANDINESS means 'the state of being RANDY' then why should
>TRUTHINESS mean 'the condition of SEEMING true'?

partly because of blocking.  Just as (cf. Aronoff 1976) "fury" blocks
"furiosity" as a nominalization of "furious" while "curiosity" is
fine because of the non-existence of "cury" as a base of "curious",
and just as "fallacy" blocks "fallacity" alongside e.g. "tenacity",
so too we have "happiness", "randiness", and "silliness" as
nominalizations because there's not "hap", "rand", or "sill" (on the
relevant senses) to block them.  So that predicts the non-existence
of "truthiness", given "truth", but not really--what it predicts is
that if the former exists, it won't mean exactly what the latter does
("partial blocking", "pre-emption by synonymy"--Clark & Clark 1979,
Kiparsky 1982).  "Trueness" is pretty rare and won't have much
potency as a blocker; "truthfulness" on the other hand does, and we
predict (correctly, as it turns out) that "truthiness" won't
completely overlap with "truthfulness", or "truthy" with the
well-established "truthful".

>I realize that TRUTHINESS is
>derived from TRUTHY 'truth-like', but TRUTHY is itself not a "real"
>word,   and the
>"-Y" suffix is so ambiguous, that the connection between TRUTHINESS and
>TRUTHY is opaque.
>
Is the connection between a noun "Xiness" and an adjective "Xy" ever
really opaque, if the latter actually exists?

Larry

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