Rectitude (Noun)

Sentence with Context:

A few weeks later, Mark Zuckerberg, looking for investors, visited the office of the Washington Post and met with Donald Graham, the paper’s publisher and CEO. They agreed on a verbal deal: the Post would pay $6m for 10% of the company. Zuckerberg later called Graham in tears – a Silicon Valley venture-capital firm had offered a more generous investment, and he was tempted to take it. Graham, impressed by the young man’s display of rectitude, gave him his blessing to renege on the deal.

Source: www.theguardian.com

The Netherlands has long been known as one of the world’s most infamous tax havens, siphoning off hundreds of billions of euros in corporate profits and international financial flows and keeping other governments from taxing them properly. To depict the Netherlands as a pillar of fiscal rectitude is to deny the myriad ways in which the very architecture of the Dutch tax system actively serves to undermine the fiscal capacity of its European and international partners.

Source: www.theguardian.com

A true war story is never moral. It does not instruct, nor encourage virtue, nor suggest models of proper human behaviour, nor restrain men from doing the things men have always done. If at the end of a war story you feel that some small bit of rectitude has been salvaged from the larger waste, then you have been made the victim of a very old and terrible lie.

Source: The Things They Carried by Tim O’Brien

Meaning: Morally correct behaviour or thinking; Righteousness; The quality or state of being correct in judgement or procedure

Synonyms

Goodness, Morality, Honour, Righteousness, Probity, Uprightness, Honesty, Integrity

Antonyms

Dishonesty, Infamy, Immorality, Inequity

Mnemonic (Memory Aid): How To Remember?

Connect “RECT-itude” with “cor-RECT“. Thus, anyone who displays correct and moral behaviour is displaying rectitude. Remember thus.

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