triticism
(n.) [ˈtrɪtɪˌsɪzəm] — trite remark (OED)
This word, qua word, might be easily confused (EC) with tritheism, which is “an interpretation of the doctrine of the Trinity according to which the three Persons are three distinct Gods,” an interpretation and belief that strikes me, though I am certainly no theologian, as heretical, if the Trinity in the above definition is indeed the Trinity made famous and controversial by Christians and not some other threesome such as Porthos, Athos and Aramis; Moe, Larry and Curley; Tinker, Evers and Chance; or Dewey, Cheatem and Howe. In respect to their meanings, however, these words populate very different semantic spaces, and yet triticism is a comforting find in that it fits neatly with the other adjectivally-based -isms stored in most literate speakers’ (word) root cellars. I speak of everyone’s favorite, truism and its close companion falsism—See WOTD 11-14-23—which sit next to witticism, trivialism, tribalism and anticolonialism.
Walter Scott, knighted at some point in his illustrious career as a romantic novelist so as to become Sir Walter Scott, wrote a multivolume—Scott was, along with Charles Dickens and Anthony Trollope and a number of others of a similar sort, one of the more prolific nineteenth century novelists who seemed devoted to multivolumism, long-winded writers who seemed to multiply like rabbits or fruit-flies. Scott, in one of his less well-known efforts titled Redgauntlet, writes of the nervous discomfort a young gallant felt in the presence of a beautiful young woman he was lucky enough to squire to the theatre and sit beside during the performance, as he tried to summon some self-assurance while struggling with little apparent success to say something that would redound to his credit or at least not make him sound the fool.
… I handed my partner to her seat, and took my place by her side, as one who had a right to offer the attentions usual on such an occasion. She was visibly embarrassed, but I was determined not to observe her confusion, and to avail myself of the opportunity of learning whether this beautiful creature’s mind was worthy of the casket in which Nature had lodged it.
Nevertheless, however courageously I formed this resolution, you cannot but too well guess the difficulties I must needs have felt in carrying it into execution; since want of habitual intercourse with the charmers of the other sex has rendered me a sheepish cur, only one grain less awkward than thyself. Then she was so very beautiful, and assumed an air of so much dignity, that I was like to fall under the fatal error of supposing she should only be addressed with something very clever; and in the hasty racking which my brains underwent in this persuasion, not a single idea occurred that common sense did not reject as fustian on the one hand, or weary, flat, and stale triticism on the other. I felt as if my understanding were no longer my own, …1
Such a common, easily recognizable circumstance, a circumstance that is in fact so easy to recognize that to envision oneself in the scene requires almost no imaginative effort whatsoever, and so the scene, had it been instead a remark, would justly become a most apposite example of a triticism.
Sir Walter Scott, Bart., Redgauntlet, A Tale of the Eighteenth Century. In Two Volumes. Vol. 1. (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1894), pp. 183-184. See Redgauntlet : a tale of the eighteenth century : Scott, Walter, 1771-1832 : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive for the full text of this novel.