What is truth? ... Stephen Byers
Photograph: PA
This week's terrestrial repeat of The Thick of It - in which Chris Langham's government minister lies to a select committee - came on the heels of Stephen Byers' apology to the Commons for misleading the house.
The report by the select committee on standards and privileges should be required reading for all undergraduate courses in semantics. Mr Byers, it found, made a statement to the transport sub-committee which was "factually inaccurate", and the committee was thereby "misled". It goes on to criticise Mr Byers for not being more precise (and, indeed, more contrite) in subsequent explanations, and drops a heavy hint that instead of "genuine clarifications and corrections", his later statements tended towards "purely cosmetic improvement of the evidence". What it does not do is use the word "lie" at any point. I was reminded of Pilate's airily off-hand question to Jesus in John 18: "What is truth?"
Notwithstanding its curious status in British political discourse, the word truth belongs to what I find a fascinating group of words; abstract nouns formed with the suffix - th. We have true - truth, grow - growth, deep - depth, and then words where the originating adjective has fallen into relative disuse, such as hale - health, weal - wealth. What fascinates me is the way the suffix has come in and out of fashion over time. The OED traces it back to two separate sets of Proto-Indo-European suffixes, and quotes a few even more opaque examples - filth (from earlier incarnations of "foul") and death, for example. Sloth, too, is from slow-th.
My favourites, though, are the words, as the OED puts it, "of later analogical formation". So in 1607, for instance, a Black Country playwright by the name of William Shakespeare noticed that you could whack -th on the end of a verb to form a noun, and came up with "our vaults have wept with drunken spilth of wine". He wasn't the first, or the last - steal-th pops up around 1200, originally meaning theft, and the early seventeenth century also sees the birth (another one, by the way) of blowth. Some time later, nobody can see the usefulness of this little suffix, and by the time of writing, few people can see it at all.
It doesn't have to be this way, of course. Who now will join me in reviving this useful feature of the English language? Will it be young men, barely out of their boyth? Or older people, in the wise days of their greyth? Come now, there's no need for coyth.
