"As I deliberate and I listen to the gentleman from Tennessee, I have to make the point that when you challenge the mendacity of the leader or another member ... " he said. And:"I would make the point that the leader and the speaker have established their integrity and their mendacity for years ... "
Trouble is, mendacity means 1. Untruthfulness, the tendency or habit of lying, deceiving, misrepresenting the truth. 2. A lie or falsehood.
Mendacity comes, Dr. Goodword writes, with an adjective, mendacious "untruthful, lying" and an adverb, mendaciously. It may also be combined with the second element of another Good Word, stultiloquent, creating mendaciloquent, meaning "speaking with a forked tongue", that is to say, "in lies".
So it's a pretty good word to have around Congress.
Here's its history: Mendacity was taken from the French reworking of Latin mendacitas "mendacity", a word derived from mendax (mendac-s) "lying, deceitful". This word came from an ancestor of mendum "fault, defect", whose root we see in amend, which became simply mend in English, and mendicant "beggar". The only relative of this word I could find outside Latin is Sanskrit minda "physical defect". So it seems to be an Indo-European word that did not spread far over the course of history.
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