From The New York TImes
In a Swirl of ‘Untruths’ and ‘Falsehoods,’ Calling a Lie a Lie
By Dan Barry
Words matter.
And from the moment he became president, Donald J. Trump has unleashed so many of consequence that the public has barely had time to parse their full implication....But such a baseless statement by a president challenged the news media to find the precise words to describe it.
The words needed to be exactly right. “And the language has a rich vocabulary for describing statements that fall short of the truth,” said Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Information. “They’re ‘baseless,’ they’re ‘bogus,’ they’re ‘lies,’ they’re ‘untruths.’”...
“A whole vocabulary has come bubbling up that would not have been used five years ago,” Mr. Nunberg said in an interview. “People are going to have to sit down and decide: Are we going to want to go over the moral consequences of telling an untruth? The mere fact of it being untrue? Or the fact that it’s bogus, baseless or groundless?”...
To say that someone has “lied,” an active verb, or has told a “lie,” a more passive, distancing noun, is to say that the person intended to deceive. In addition, Mr. Nunberg said, “a certain moral opprobrium attaches to it, a reprehensibility of motive.”
