liar meaning — an explainer, sort of

the unopened mail pile leans like it is bored of me. liar, i looked it up, is the shortest word for a long habit. tom liked short words. tom…

writing this from the desk on a wednesday, 4:18pm. the printer two rows over is doing something wrong with paper. the rest of the morning is mine, conservatively.

so: liar meaning. five letters. one long habit. tom, at uni, kept an index card on the fridge with five words on it — “yes,” “no,” “soon,” “fine,” and “liar” — and said longer words made you sound like you were stalling. that is the entry. that is the post. let’s open it.

liar meaning: a person who tells lies. that is the entire dictionary part. the part nobody bothers to print is that “liar” usually doesn’t describe one moment, it describes a small accumulating shape — the kind of shape a pile of mail makes when it has been leaning since february and you keep walking past it. five letters. one long habit.

LIAR. FIVE LETTERS. NO ARGUMENT.

liar meaning, the dictionary part nobody actually reads

i looked it up. the consensus, in the english i was taught and the english i use to write emails i later regret, is that a liar is a person who tells lies. that is the whole entry. a noun, a habit, a person. dictionaries normally cannot help themselves — “of habitual untruth,” “given to falsehood,” “morally compromised in matters of speech” — but here the entry is short. five letters in, five words out. tom would have approved.

the longer version of the same idea lives over at the pillar i wrote on the bare word liar, which i mostly succeeded at for eleven hundred words before the mail pile interrupted me.

stefan-of-words explains liar, in a vest he does not own

let me put on the vest. i do not own a vest. for the next two paragraphs i am the stefan-of-words for the bare noun “liar,” which means i’ll talk about a five-letter word the way a sommelier talks about a wine he is overcharging you for. i cannot taste forest floor. i can, however, taste a word.

so. liar. on the nose: the L — liquid, leaning, lukewarm. then the I sits up briefly before collapsing into the A, which has the texture of a shoulder shrug. by the R you’ve stopped paying attention, which is exactly the trick. notice the dryness. notice the lack of finish. liar does not finish — that is its work. compare it to “fraudster,” which has too much body, or “dissembler,” which is, frankly, drunk on itself. liar is austere. it pays rent on time. it sits on a fridge between “yes” and “no” and lets the longer words do the showing-off.

tom would say “five letters” — tom would not even say it as a sentence, he would point at the card. that was the second-best free writing lesson i ever got. (see also: jim carrey, liar liar, 1997, on the surface a film about a man who cannot lie for one day, on the inside a film about a man who learns one less word is sometimes the entire plot.)

what liar means when the leaning pile gets cited as evidence

the pile, for the record, is mail. it lives on a small console table by the door. it has been leaning, at a measurable angle, since february. i know it has been since february because the top envelope is a valentine’s flyer from a pizza place i no longer order from. four envelopes deep, by texture, is one i’m pretty sure is from the taxman, who sends letters in serif font, because that is the only way the taxman writes. nobody else uses that font for a personal letter. nobody.

here is where “liar” gets uncomfortable on me, personally, which is the only way a word ever really gets defined. when i walk past the pile and tell myself “i’ll get to it tomorrow” — and i have been telling myself that since february — the question, in any honest court, is whether i am lying to myself. i’d like to argue no. i’d like to argue optimism. but optimism that has been wrong twelve weeks running stops being optimism and starts being a small soft daily habit, and the dictionary has a five-letter word for that habit, and you can guess which one.

liar vs the longer words people use to feel better

english has a small staircase of softer words for liar — fibber, storyteller, spinner, embellisher, economical with the truth (a sentence so polite it should be illegal). each one carries the same noun, but in a coat. liar is the noun without the coat. that is why it stings, and the stinging is the meaning.

there is also a longer technical staircase — the pathological version, where lying becomes structural rather than a wednesday accident; the longer-form definition i wrote about pathological lying, where i looked into it and concluded i’m not one of those, but i am an enthusiastic recreational user of “i’ll get to it tomorrow”; and the compulsive cousin of the same word, which is a different machine altogether. and if you want the difference between a liar and an idiot — a separate question, but a fair one — i wrote about the bare word dumb once: liar is about intention, dumb is about outcome, and most of my best stories happen at the corner where those two meet at an intersection without a stoplight.

the supermarket memory, which is, i promise, on topic

two summers ago i was in the supermarket — the one between the bus stop and the bank i avoid — and ran into a man i had not seen since uni. he wasn’t tom. he had been at one party tom had also been at, and they had merged in my head the way people do when you only meet them in adjacent rooms. he said “hey, how have you been.” i said “good.” that was a lie. a five-letter lie. i was holding a frozen pizza i couldn’t afford and a six-pack of those tiny pickles i don’t like, under a fluorescent light that has never lied to anyone.

he asked about tom. i said tom was great. i had not spoken to tom in fourteen months. that one was bigger, with a small audible pickle-jar accompaniment because the basket was clinking. i lied for, by my count, four minutes. then i went home, ate the pizza, walked past the pile, told it i’d get to it tomorrow. the third lie of the afternoon. small leaning angle.

findings, sort of, from the desk where the spreadsheet should be

so, after the index card and stefan-the-vest and the pile that has been leaning since february and a film about a lawyer cursed into accidental honesty for one full day — here are my findings, on a wednesday at 11:09am.

liar is a small word for a long habit. that is what it means. liar meaning, when you actually use it on yourself, in the kitchen, in the supermarket, in front of a pile of envelopes with architectural intent, is closer to a posture than a noun. you do not become a liar in a moment. you become one in a routine. you walk past the pile. you say “tomorrow.” it is wednesday. it has been wednesday twelve times.

tom, who liked short words, would say all of the above in two. but i don’t have tom’s discipline. i don’t have tom’s volvo, either. i have a console table, a leaning pile, and a five-letter word i am, at this hour, in front of god and the taxman, on first-name terms with.

↑