A Sad State of Affairs

Sometimes even the Oxford English Dictionary isn't any help, and then what do you do?

Here's the opening paragraph from this Slate.com article about Frost/Nixon, a stage play about David Frost's historic interview with Richard Nixon:

In 1983, Paul Berman called Richard Nixon "the richest, most promising character the American theater has ever seen." Recalling the scores of Nixons that had, even then, already appeared on stage and screen, Berman noted, "His personality descends to almost oceanic depth, plunging from bright intelligence through piety, vulgarity, maudlinity and paranoia to the murky floor of violent criminality. His quivering cheeks and humped back are an actor's dream."

"Maudlinity"? Really?

If I had to form a noun out of the adjective "maudlin"--it's something that's never come up before--I think I would have to choose "maudlinness". The suffix "-ity" is very frequently found in English, but it's generally reserved for adjectives which end in "-ine", which are many: "feminine", say, or "vespertine". Adjectives ending in "-in" are considerably rarer, since that suffix is generally applied to scientific words by way of turning them into nouns: its appearance at the end of "maudlin" is an accident of history and spelling. (It's not a suffix at all: "maudlin" is a corruption of "Magdalen", since Mary Magdalene was often shown weeping.)

But the OED, as I said, doesn't list either word, so we're left to fall back on our own resources. Google "maudlinity" and you get 249 hits, where "maudlinness" gets 1740, and, to boot, is in the (non-OED) dictionaries, including Answers.com and the Macintosh spellchecker. You know which one gets my vote.