Birth of a nova--not?

[Jonathan Lighter]

Easy to pronounce - and spell and remember !  Like a cool new brand name !  Especially when few people under forty have ever even heard the word "verisimilitude" !  And did I mention easier to recognize in writing ?  And funnier ?

  Oh, gosh, the future is soooo rosy !

  JL


Alice Faber <faber at HASKINS.YALE.EDU> wrote:
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Sender: American Dialect Society
Poster: Alice Faber
Organization: Haskins Laboratories
Subject: Re: Birth of a nova--not?
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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'? 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.
>

I'm not so sure, Ron.

The thing with VERISIMILITUDE is that it's hard to say; you have to
think about the stress pattern (it just took me three introspective
tries to get *something* plausible). On the other hand, TRUTHINESS is
easy to pronounce.

--
 =============================================================================
Alice Faber faber at haskins.yale.edu
Haskins Laboratories tel: (203) 865-6163 x258
New Haven, CT 06511 USA fax (203) 865-8963

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