Opinion: A Linguist's Defense Of 'Falsehood'

In his essay " On Liars ," philosopher Michel de Montaigne famously wrote that the truth has a single face, while its opposite has "a hundred thousand faces." That disproportion is reflected in the English dictionary. We have only a handful of words to describe statements that correspond to reality, like "correct" and "accurate." In fact, we don't even have a single word that means "tell the truth," which is probably to our credit. But we have a vast vocabulary to describe all the ways statements can depart from reality, and it's gotten a considerable workout over the last couple of years. Every news cycle seems to bring a new claim from the White House or elsewhere that cries out for correction and sends editors and journalists to their thesauruses , as politics makes linguists of us all. Should they simply qualify the statement itself, and if so, should it be called false or questionable, spurious or bogus, misleading or baseless? Or should they directly challenge the speaker's