Birth of a nova--not?

[Joel S. Berson]

Doesn't one have to start with an adjective to add -ness?  E.g.,
happy. So "truth" must become an adjective first, and "truthful"
already has the nearly-opposite meaning from "truthy".

Joel

At 1/19/2006 10:56 AM, you wrote:
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>Subject:      Birth of a nova--not?
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>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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