Birth of a nova--not?

[Brenda Lester]

I agree. Waited for back-up.


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.



> On the issue of Frey, it is interesting to see that Allan has adopted the
> language of the media--"admitted" and "embellished"--in referring to Frey's
> really splendid book on addiction and rehabilitation. These words both imply
> that Frey did something wrong in adding fictionalized details to his "memoir,"
> a genre that goes back to the 16th century at least and that is not the same
> thing as an autobiography, in which one expects literal truth. If the author
> of the 18th Century "memoir," FANNY HILL really did all the things that Fanny
> says she did, then the 18th Century was a lot more queer than anyone ever
> thought.
>

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