I heard Susan Estrich say this during a Fox News Channel interview a couple of days ago.

Problem:
A fact by definition is true, so “some truth to the fact” makes no sense.

Explanation:
The phrase “some truth to the fact” is, unfortunately, a common English blunder.

I don’t know whether this political advisor to former President William Clinton made this blunder honestly or was using the political double-speak to which so many advisors fall prey.

If it was an honest blunder, then I believe that it was consistent with my “Devolution toward Simpler” hypothesis. It’s simpler (Try it!) to say “fact” than to say “claim” — the correct final noun for this phrase.

For fun, I searched Google for each of the following phrases (with the quotation marks) and got about the indicated numbers of matches:

• “some truth to the fact” — 273,000 matches
• “some truth to the claim” — 15,200 matches

This tells me that Web authors have written the phrase incorrectly vs. correctly by a ratio of 17.96:1, which is dreadful! (“Oh, the humanity!”)

Solution:
“Maybe there’s some truth to the claim …”