I’m not aware of a word in the English language that means the opposite of “liar.”
Are you?
(I tweeted this question out a week ago; the closest I got was “truth-teller.” Unsatisfying.)
Yes, we have truth, candor, honesty, and such, but we also have lie, fabrication, perjury, fib, and prevarication… amongst others.
What’s interesting to me is that all those negatives can be turned into verbs: liar, fabricator, perjurer, fibber, prevaricator… but not so for the virtuous words.
I’m guessing that some readers are right now ending their mental search for a single word that means, “truth teller,” or maybe closing down their dictionary/thesaurus app or coming back from a “define:liar” search on Google, and rationalizing that such a word must not exist because it’s presumed in our society that such behavior is the default, making the language to describe it unnecessary.
But…
If telling the truth is the default activity and unnecessary to describe, then wouldn’t the same hold true for “truth” itself? I have two problems with this scenario:
First, I sincerely doubt, from the looks of things, that telling the truth is a default manner of behaving in our culture.
Secondly, if we don’t need a word for “someone who tells the truth,” then why do we have so many synonyms for “truth” itself? Why all the nuance around the concept, but nothing about people who live by it? Why do we need openness, honesty, candidness, truthfulness, sincerity, forthrightness, directness, plain-spokenness, bluntness, straightforwardness, and outspokenness, but no simple way to describe the people who act this way?
Do we not have a need to identify people for their consistent truth telling as simply and readily as can identify liars?
I often tell the truth. I try to tell it always, but—hi!—welcome to life. In at least two personal dealings I can think of, I have been a right bastard. What bugs me—aside from the unfinished business I have to right those wrongs—is that I have ample verbs to describe my actions in those areas but none to describe my behavior in the many situations where I’ve gotten it right.
I think that’s wrong.
We need a word for telling the truth—a single word, to serve as the opposite of “to lie.”
I humbly suggest, “to truth,” conjugated thusly:
I truth / You truth / We truth / He truths / They truth
And one who truths? A truther, of course.
Unless you’ve got a better idea?
