spuriosity

English
WOTD – 27 December 2016

Etymology

spurious +‎ -osity.

Pronunciation

Noun

spuriosity (countable and uncountable, plural spuriosities)

  1. (rare) Spuriousness.
    • 1736, Alexander Pope, “To the Sisters”, in Mr. Pope's Literary Correspondence, volume IV, 2nd edition, London: Printed for E[dmund] Curll, at Pope's-Head, in Rose-Street, Covent-Garden, OCLC 642528417, page vi:
      Ye are next to aſſure all Perſons, who are ſo kind as to give you Audience, that to prevent the leaſt Suſpicion of Spurioſity, they may ſee every Letter I have ever printed of Mr. Pope’s in his Own Hand-Writing, […]
    • [1862 August – 1863 March, Charles Kingsley, chapter IV, in The Water-Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land-Baby, London; Cambridge: Macmillan and Co., published 1863, OCLC 2169852, page 168:
      So she made Sir John write to the "Times" to command the Chancellor of the Exchequer for the time being to put a tax on long words:— […] A heavy tax on words over four syllables, as heterodoxy, spontaneity, spiritualism, spuriosity, &c.]
    • 1874 June 1, Francis Barham, “On Swedenborg’s Theology. An Unpublished Fragment.”, in The Intellectual Repository and New Jerusalem Magazine (Enlarged Series; XXI), volume XLIX (Entire Work), number 246, London: Published by the General Conference of the New Church, signified by the New Jerusalem in the Revelation: And sold by James Speirs, 36 Bloomsbury Street, OCLC 2277400, page 263:
      This is the sort of struggle which proves a man's metal, and declares it sterling or counterfeit. No spuriosity, no charlatanry can stand this fiery alembic of hard-wrought and exquisite calculation, in which one mathematic point or unit misplaced destroys the whole chain of reasoning, and proves the candidate a blunderer.
    • 2001, K. K. Ruthven, Faking Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, →ISBN, page 108:
      The supposition that authors have a preternatural ability to detect spuriosity in writing is as false as the comparable belief that their literary practices make them unerring as literary critics.
    • 2013, R. R. Whitehead; A. Watt; B. J. Cole; I. Morrison, “Computational Methods for Shell-model Calculations”, in Michel Baranger and Erich Vogt, editors, Advances in Nuclear Physics, volume 9, New York, N.Y.: Plenum Press, DOI:10.1007/978-1-4615-8234-2, →ISBN, page 168:
      Clearly, there is no solution to the problem of spurious center-of-mass motion in the nonseparable case. Mathematically it is not even a well-defined problem. The only course is to be very careful not to draw conclusions which may be dependent on the spuriosity of the states in question. In particular, the spuriosity should be checked by evaluating <Hem> for the final eigenstates.
  2. (rare) That which is spurious; something false or illegitimate.
    • 1983, John Spitzer, Authorship and Attribution in Western Art Music (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation), Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University, OCLC 640089122, page 204:
      Haydn spuriosities were generated by demand for [Joseph] Haydn's works and by manuscript circulation. In genres like keyboard sonatas, piano trios and songs, where manuscript circulation was light, there were relatively few spuriosities.
    • 2004, Janice M. Irvine, Talk about Sex: The Battles over Sex Education in the United States, Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press, →ISBN, page 225, endnote 3 to chapter 3:
      In their study of American extremist groups, John George and Laird Wilcox note that although distorting or actually fabricating quotations is commonly employed by extremists, "American leftists have used spuriosities of that sort sparingly, [while] groups and individuals on the far right have raised such utilizations to a high art form."

Synonyms

Antonyms
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