Verisimilitude

Verisimilitude (pronounced ver-uh-si-mil-i-tood (alt –tyood))

(1) The appearance or semblance of truth; likelihood; probability, quality of seeming true.

(2) Something that merely seems to be true or real, such as a doubtful statement.

(3) In literary fiction, faithfulness to its own rules; internal cohesion.

(4) In film & TV etc, props, sets, backdrops et al assembled to create as accurate as possible an emulation of reality.

1595-1605: From the 1540s French verisimilitude (appearance of truth or reality, likelihood), from the Latin vērīsimilitūdō (likeness to truth), the construct being veri (genitive of verum, neuter of verus (true)) + similis (similar; like, resembling; of the same kind).  In Classical Latin, it was more correctly written as vērī similitūdō.  The Latin verus was from the primitive Indo-European root were-o- (true, trustworthy).  Verisimilitude & verisimilarity are nouns and verisimilar, verisimilitudinous & verisimilous are adjectives.

A word for critics, directors, students etc

In modern philosophy, verisimilitude is a philosophical concept which distinguishes between the relative and apparent (or seemingly so) truth and falsity of assertions and hypotheses.  Able at least to approach perfection in mathematics, applied to other fields, the problem arises in trying to define what it takes for one false theory to be closer to the truth than another false theory; analogies with string theory are tempting.  For Austrian philosopher Karl Popper (1902-1994), for whom truth was (and must be) the object of scientific inquiry, the problem was the acknowledgment that most scientific theories in history have been shown to be false.  Therefore, it must, from time to time, be at least possible for one false theory to be closer to the truth than others.

In literary fiction, verisimilitude, even if cleverly executed, can attract disapprobation.  Those writings of Phillip Roth (1933-2018) which in some way document the author’s construct of how women think (and he had a bit of previous there) usually reflect a perfect internal logic without which, as literature, his text wouldn’t have worked.  Solid verisimilitude therefore but more than one feminist critic has both deconstructed and demurred, finding his world-view a bogus male fantasy.  Perhaps more than other living writers, Roth’s literary relationships tended more to be with his critics than his readers; in less unforgiving times he might have received the Nobel Prize his body of work may have deserved.  In popular culture, verisimilitude is most commonly used to describe things which make film and television “realistic”; props, costumes and such.  It’s a popular word in university courses with studies in their titles (peace studies, media studies, gender studies, communications studies etc).  Academics in these fields adore words like verisimilitude and paradigm, encouraging their students to use them wherever possible.

Failures in verisimilitude in Mean Girls (2004): One of the props was a framed photograph representing Cady Heron during her childhood in Africa, sitting atop an elephant.  The elephant is of a different taxonomy, being an Asian elephant (Elephas maximus) instead of the appropriate African savanna bush elephant (Loxodonta africana) known in Kenya.  The left hand's inadvertent srpski pozdrav (a three-fingered Serbian salute originally expressing the Holy Trinity and used in rituals of the Orthodox Church which has (like much in the Balkans) been re-purposed as a nationalist symbol) is a Photoshop fail.