![]() ![]() Today, fabrication is most often used when lie seems too harsh. In her departing column, the sadder and wiser journalist apologized to readers for committing ''one of the cardinal sins of journalism: Thou shalt not fabricate.'' Recently, Patricia Smith, a talented young columnist for The Boston Globe, was discovered by her editors to have made up quotations. In helping his longtime aide, William Burwell, prepare his defense against accusations of cowardice, Jefferson wrote, ''This fabricated flight from Richmond was not among the charges.'' That sense of ''cooked up, untrue''continues. #Clockmaker synonym full#In his 1972 ''Hog on Ice,'' Charles Funk speculated that tailors were suspected of being deceptive: ''Instead of using whole material, as they advertised, they were really using patched or pieced goods, or, it might be, cloth which had been falsely stretched to appear to be of full width.''The material presented as being of whole cloth, on that theory, had become suspect.Ĭome at cloth another way, through its synonym fabric, from the Latin fabrica, ''workshop,'' a place or structure where things like clothing are made.įabricate means ''to construct, manufacture, frame'' in the 18th century, it took on a sinister sense of ''to make up a story, to invent a lie, to forge a document.'' In 1805, President Thomas Jefferson was accused of having cravenly fled from the state capital, Richmond, during the Revolution, when he was Governor of Virginia. In 1840, the Canadian novelist Thomas Haliburton, in his dialect-rich ''The Clockmaker,'' had his Yankee character named Sam Slick say: ''All that talk about her timper was made out of whole cloth, and got up a-purpose. Like a sense of the whole person - well balanced, ''together'' - whole cloth has integrity, akin to ''all wool and a yard wide.'' Then, early in the 19th century, the phrase's meaning flipped. #Clockmaker synonym full size#Just what is the whole cloth? And what has any cloth to do with lying?Ī whole cloth, or broadcloth, is material of the full size as originally manufactured - not the end bit or remnant or piece cut out of the whole for reuse in a quilt or smaller-size garment. ![]() Although the meaning is clear - ''a story invented with no basis in fact a complete fiction''- the metaphoric origin is obscure. She writes that she has not been able to find the origin of made up out of whole cloth. This usage puzzles Elizabeth Hopkins in the editorial department of The International Herald Tribune. ''The courts cannot be in the business of creating new privileges,'' Starr said, ''from whole cloth.'' ![]() When a young journalist embarrassed The New Republic and other publications by fabricating articles, the columnist Richard Cohen wrote that the young man should seek another line of work after having filed articles ''made up out of whole cloth.''Ībout the same time, the independent counsel Kenneth Starr made a speech about the tendency of Government lawyers to seek excuses like ''executive privilege'' or ''protective privilege''to prevent witnesses from testifying. ![]()
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