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March 2010In Case You Were WonderingAfter American Idol announced it was dropping a contestant because of a "lack of veracity" during the audition process, veracity became the most looked up word for a week (but ended the month just out of the Top 50). In case you were wondering, veracity, which has an ancestor in the Latin word for true or truthful, shares that ancestor with both verity and verisimilitude. In truth, all three nouns have shades of meaning worth parsing. Verity usually designates the quality of being true or entirely in accordance with factual reality. Verisimilitude (from the Latin veri similis, meaning "like the truth") is used to indicate the quality of a representation that causes one to accept it as true. And veracity, the noun that got people curious, commonly indicates rigid and unfailing adherence to, observance of, or respect for the truth. |