Birth of a nova--not?

[Laurence Horn]

Alice quoth:
>I've been pondering this for a day now (after having been slammed for my
>inability to pronounce a word that's been part of my passive vocabulary
>for 40 years!). TRUTHINESS, as it was defined at the WOTY session, and,
>as I've seen it used since, is *not* the same thing as VERISIMILITUDE.
>VERISIMILITUDE is, to me, a literary quality, while TRUTHINESS is a
>quality of political rhetoric.
>
>As for the pronunciation difficulties, it's the stress pattern. The
>similarities with VERitable lead me to VERisimilitude, which has too
>many unstressed syllables in sequence. The alternative, verisiMIlitude
>suffers from a similar problem.
>
Well, given the usual rules, you'll end up with secondary stress on
the first syllable to go with the primary on the antepenult, which
seems just right:  vèrisimílitude--a classical double dactyl, as in
"microbiology" or "audiovisual" or "Afro-American" or
"nymphomanical".  In fact if you've composed or read any
double-dactyls (those "higgledy-piggledy" poems of the form invented,
or perfected, by Anthony Hecht and Yale's own John Hollander, you've
encountered one per poem in the third line of the second stanza.  Cf.
e.g.

http://lonestar.texas.net/~robison/dactyls.html
http://www.stinky.com/dactyl/dactyl.html#poems
http://www.sfu.ca/~finley/dactyl.html

larry

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