Mendacity

By Deane Barker

Definition: a lie or untruth

A “mendacity” can be a single thing someone says, or it can be a quality they possess.

Why I Looked It Up

From The Constitution of Knowledge: A Defense of Truth:

Even accounting for whatever you believe to be the biases of fact checkers, they was no serious disputing that the volume and audacity of Trump’s mendacity had broken through America’s epistemic guardrails, such as they were.

Postscript

Added on

From an H.P. Lovecraft short story:

[…] genuine photographs – actual optical links with what they portrayed, and the product of an impersonal transmitting process with prejudice, fallibility, or mendacity.

Basically, photographs (in that era) don’t lie.

Postscript

Added on

In a ruling over a case of prosecutorial misconduct, the judge said:

McAfee ruled that either Wade or Willis would have to leave the case, as an “odor of mendacity remains” over the circumstances of their relationship.

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