Dragaera

Off topic question for Dr Whom

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Thu Mar 11 15:55:10 PST 2004

On Thu, 11 Mar 2004, Mark Tiller wrote:

#You can talk about honesty and integrity, which becomes honest
#and.....What?

A pain in the .... Not the person, the language. We don't HAVE an
adjective for "integrity" except "integral", which is so firmly
established with specific meanings as to exclude this particular
metaphorical one. People say "a person of integrity". Actually, I'm most
used to seeing "a man of integrity" -- it's a cliche -- and "a woman of
integrity" is the obvious counterpart. You probably wouldn't want to say
"... person ..." except in an indefinite case, where the individual is
indefinite or not identified:

 We need a person of integrity in this position.

 I was informed of this by a person of integrity, whose veracity is
unquestionable.

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
   Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel