Arguing and objecting

The twenty-second entry is la verosimiglianza, and its make-up is visible on the surface. It is verum and similis welded together, like the truth, so the Italian adjective verosimile says of an account that it resembles what is true without claiming to be true. English owns that same compound as « verisimilitude », but it never became ordinary: it lives in criticism, where it describes how convincingly a novel or a painting imitates the world, and nobody uses it about a colleague’s excuse. The everyday English word is « plausible », and it was built on a different measurement altogether. Latin plausibilis meant deserving applause, from plaudere, to clap. So where Italian holds a story up against the truth, English holds it up against an audience, which is why « plausible » can carry a faint suspicion, as in « a plausible rogue », while verosimile carries no such shadow at all. Italian does have plausibile as well and uses it of a hypothesis. But the ordinary noun is la verosimiglianza del racconto, and « the verisimilitude of the account » is not English anybody speaks.