Sunday, October 24, 2010

mendacious


\men-DAY-shus\

adjective

: given to or characterized by deception or falsehood or divergence from absolute truth

Today, while procrastinating the writing of this blog, I watched an episode of True Blood during which our word-of-the-day was mentioned.

"A testimony from the MENDACIOUS Mr. Compton."

I actually said "Ooh!" out loud from my bed. I leapt up to pause the show and type out the quote, verbatim. So, there it is, MENDACIOUS, inadvertently used in a sentence by a fictional vampire. And I am none the wiser.

This is what I consider to be a thought-provoking coincidence. On a scale of one to five, one being fairly ordinary (bumping into a former coworker on the street) and five being absurdly extraordinary (bumping into a former coworker on a bus in Munich) I would deem this coincidence a 2.8. According to wordcount.org, MENDACIOUS ranks 77,235 out of the 86,800 most used words in the English language, falling between kovacs* and myriophyllum.** That means it lands within only the top 89th percentile. I would call that infrequent. The fact that I happened to watch this episode of True Blood on the same day I received this word from Merriam-Webster adds to the obscurity of these concomitant events. If I knew more about math I would conjure up some equation blending that 89th percentile (which I did figure with my 12-year-old scientific calculator) with the number of times the word MENDACIOUS is featured on the show True Blood (although I'm sure this information is harder to come by) and somehow arrive at 2.8.

Until I learn more math, I'm standing by my estimate.


*Unclear as to the meaning of this one. The singular form of this word is the slavic word for blacksmith. Kovacs just seems to be a surname.
**A genus of freshwater aquatic plants.


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