Word of the Day | verity

verity •\ˈver-ə-tē\• noun

1. conformity to reality or actuality
2. an enduring or necessary ethical or religious or aesthetic truth

The word verity has appeared in 12 New York Times articles in the past year, including on Aug. 19 in the book review “Here if You Need Me” by William Giraldi:

There are two species of novelist: one writes as if the world is a known locale that requires dutiful reporting, the other as if the world has yet to be made. The former enjoys the complacency of the au courant and the lassitude of at-hand language, while the latter believes with Thoreau that ”this world is but canvas to our imaginations,” that the only worthy assertion of imagination occurs by way of linguistic originality wed to intellect and emotional verity. You close ”Don Quixote” and ”Tristram Shandy,” ”Middlemarch” and ”Augie March,” and the cosmos takes on a coruscated import it rather lacked before, an ”eternal and irrepressible freshness,” in Pound’s apt phrase. His definition of literature is among the best we have: ”Language charged with meaning.” How charged was the last novel you read?

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