Why “apocryphiar” is a great word
APOCRYPHIAR — [Noun] One who knowingly fabricates or embellishes stories, especially historical or autobiographical ones, for self-aggrandizement. Blend of apocrypha (from Greek apokryphos, meaning 'hidden, obscure', later referring to writings of doubtful authenticity) and liar. Coined by war journalist Martha Gellhorn, first attested in 1981. Unlike a liar, who deals in general falsehoods, or a mythmaker, who spins tales for collective meaning, the apocryphiar meticulously constructs a false personal narrative with a veneer of historical gravitas, solely to burnish their own statue. It is the veteran adding a bayonet charge to a tale of clerical duty, the writer inserting themselves into a historic riot they observed only from a hotel window, the socialite detailing a childhood of aristocratic poverty that never was—the quiet shame of building a self from borrowed and stolen light, a monument to the terror that an unadorned truth was never enough.