Word of the Day

Tuesday October 13, 2009

mendacious [men-DAY-shuhs]

adjective

I LIKE and admire "controversial MEP" Dan Hannan. He may have expressed himself a bit, ah, intemperately on Fox News -- but he was trying to make his argument heard on a complex policy issue where the weather is being made by mendacious, sub-literate drivel about "death panels" and Hitler. It's a mark of how idiotic the debate has got that we now look to Twitter -- a 140character microblogging service -- to provide the nuanced point of view.

Sam Leith, "Tweet -- it's the only way to get noticed", Evening Standard, Aug 17, 2009
Hedges says there is a great irony -- and hypocrisy -- at the heart of the current efforts to bail out failed companies. "What is so mendacious and pernicious about this is that until these institutions collapsed, all they talked about is the market and unfettered capitalism. And when, because of their own folly, greed and mismanagement, it collapsed, they are raiding the Treasury.

Tirdad Derakhshani, "Hedges' 'Empire' overrun by celebrity-worshipping, consumerism and corporate greed", Oakland Tribune, Sep 3, 2009
He will give the same boy a present on his birthday, and buy him a spade and bucket at the seaside, because it is customary to do so, being all the time neither particularly mendacious, nor particularly cruel, nor particularly generous, but simply incapable of ethical judgment or independent action.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) An Irish playwright. The Doctor's Dilemma: Preface on Doctors (1909)

Origin of the Word

Mendacious, approximately 1616, derives from Middle French mendacieux, from Latin mendacium "a lie."