liar — a definition i’m fairly sure about

the man who calls keeps calling. i let it ring. technically that is not a lie, i tell myself, because i never said i would pick up. dave swears he will pay back the three hundred. he won’t. between us, we are running a small definitions racket. he calls his version a delay. i call mine strategy. neither of us is wrong out loud.

at the desk. budget meeting on the third floor, doors closed. carla brought her own water bottle, which i interpret as a sign she expects to be in there until lunch.

so. liar. the word is heavier than it sounds. people use it like a verdict and a punctuation mark. you call somebody a liar and the conversation is, basically, over. that is the point of the word. it ends things. i would like, in this post, to slow it down, hold it up to the light, and figure out where exactly the line sits — because i live, financially and otherwise, very close to that line. some weeks i cross it. some weeks i don’t notice. that’s the post.

liar: a person who knowingly says something untrue to another person, with the intent of producing a false belief in that person’s mind. one lie does not make a liar in the heavy sense. a liar, in the way the word actually gets used, is a person whose default response to a difficult question is a small invented answer. there is a hierarchy: the strategic liar, the omitter, the polite liar, the compulsive liar, and the pathological liar. most people are at least one of these by friday.

A. LIAR. IS. A. PATTERN. NOT. A. TUESDAY.

i need that on the wall before we go further. one lie is a tuesday. one lie is also a wednesday, occasionally a friday, and, on bank holidays, a moral necessity. what makes someone a liar — in the way the word actually lands when somebody says it about you — is the pattern. and patterns, unlike single events, can be measured by anyone with a notebook and an honest morning.

what a liar actually is, in the literature i’m fairly sure exists

i looked it up. i did not, to be honest, look it up in anything you would call a serious place. i looked it up in the kind of place a man at a desk looks things up when he has a budget meeting’s worth of cover. the working definition i kept seeing, in slightly different paint, was this: a liar is a person who says, knowingly, something other than what they believe to be true, with the intent that another person will believe the said thing instead of the believed thing.

that is a sentence with too many commas. let me redo it. a liar knows the truth, says the not-truth, and wants you to take the not-truth home. three steps. all three required. no full house, no liar.

this matters because, on any given friday, i fail one of the three. i sometimes don’t know the truth. i sometimes don’t intend to be believed. i sometimes say things that are not so much false as theatrical. the literature, from what i have read of it on the back of envelopes, would call the last category “bullshit”, which is, i’m fairly sure, a technical term that has been earned and is, in any case, in print.

so when somebody calls me a liar, my first move — and i recognise this as the move of a man with something to defend — is to ask them which of the three rungs they think i was on. it usually buys me twenty seconds. twenty seconds is a long time on a friday.

lies of omission, where i happen to be the local expert

here is where it gets close to home. lies of omission are the rung most people on this page are doing the most of, and i include myself in that group like a man putting his own hand up first.

a lie of omission is when somebody asks you a question, you say a true thing, and you leave out the part that, if you said it, would change the meaning of the true thing entirely. classic example: “did you pay the bill?” — “i sent something to that account on monday.” both halves of that sentence are true. the bill was not the something. the bill is sitting, unopened, in the pile by the door, in a red envelope, in the leaning tower of unopened mail that has been a feature of my apartment since approximately the spring.

the pile, by the way, is currently, by my count, fourteen envelopes thick. seven of them are red. of the seven, two are certified. certified letters are the ones with the little sticker and the printed barcode that the post office attaches to make sure you understand the letter knows you exist. i understand. the letter is welcome to try.

am i a liar for having that pile? technically, no. nobody has asked me about each individual letter. but if anybody asked me, on a friday, “are your affairs in order”, i would say “broadly, yes, i have a system” and the word “system” would be doing the load-bearing work of a small european bridge. that’s the omission. the system is the pile.

the difference between a liar and a person with priorities

this is the section where, on most blogs, somebody would tell you a soothing story about how nobody is really a liar, we are all just doing our best, and lies are a coping mechanism. i am not going to do that. i think the word “liar” should be earned. but i also think the word is currently being used to describe a category that includes everyone with a phone, which is, statistically, everyone.

here is the working distinction, drawn at my desk: a liar is somebody who lies because the lie produces a useful outcome for them at the cost of accuracy. a person with priorities is somebody who is, at any given moment, choosing which true things to say first, given limited time, limited energy, and a phone battery currently sitting at 23%.

the distinction matters because the second category is what most of us are doing on a friday, and calling it lying is, frankly, a bit much. when i tell my mother, on a sunday call, that i’m “doing fine”, what i mean is “i am not, this week, in the kind of trouble that you can do anything about, and bringing you up to speed would cost both of us forty minutes neither of us has”. that is a priority. that is not a lie. that is, however, on a strict reading of the three rungs above, technically a lie. so. fine. i’ll wear it.

examples from my own week, this is where it gets uncomfortable

i’m going to do this in numbered form because the alternative is a paragraph that nobody, including me, would finish. these are from this week. this week is not over. i may add to the list.

1. monday. landlord asked, in passing, whether the kitchen sink was “still doing the thing”. i said “i think we got it”. we did not get it. the sink is still doing the thing. this is a strategic lie. the cost of admitting the thing is a forty-minute conversation about whether the thing is my fault.
2. tuesday. a phone call from a number i did not recognise. i did not pick up. the phone went to voicemail. the voicemail is full. it has been full since approximately august. this is, technically, a lie of omission, in that the caller is being told, without my involvement, that they cannot reach me. i did not engineer the full voicemail. i did, however, decline to clear it.
3. wednesday. a colleague, in the kitchen, asked if i had “gotten to that thing”. i said “yes, mostly”. i had not gotten to that thing at all. this is a polite lie. the polite lie is the kind we have all collectively agreed to allow in workplaces because the alternative is everyone standing in the kitchen telling the truth about what they did and did not do, which would, frankly, halt commerce.
4. friday morning. a man, presumably the same man, called from the same unknown number. i did not pick up. ChatGPT, on my phone, sent the call to a transcript. the transcript said the man would call again at his next convenience. i thanked ChatGPT internally. i am, technically, lying to ChatGPT every time i pretend i’ll deal with it tomorrow.

that is four lies in three and a half days. on the books. on a strict reading. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere — possibly in a serious magazine — that says the average adult tells between one and three lies a day. i’m running slightly above the curve. but, in fairness, i live alone, and a man living alone has more privacy in which to stack his lies up neatly.

pathological liar, the rung where i am very firmly not

this is the part where i would like to go on the record. there is a difference between a working liar and a pathological liar, and the difference is not a matter of frequency but of motive. i have, by the standards of my own conscience, a set of reasons for the small lies i tell. they are, mostly, financial, social, or skin-saving. they are, in their way, rational. when i lie, i can tell you why.

the pathological liar, as i understand it from the small reading i have done at the kind of websites that explain things in eight bullet points, lies without a clear external reason. lies for the texture of lying. lies in moments where the truth would have done just as well. lies on tuesdays in the supermarket about how many siblings they have. that’s a different thing. that’s a thing i don’t do. i am, in the strict sense, an economical liar. i lie when the lie pays. i’d like that on the record. for cinematic context, the public shorthand most people use here is the 2002 film about a teenage cheque forger who flew airplanes he did not own; that is the high end of the rung. i live considerably south of that.

i have written a separate post on the smaller, quieter signs of the compulsive liar, which is the rung directly below pathological. read that one if you want the field guide. read this one if you want the philosophy.

why people lie, by a man who occasionally does

this is, of course, the question. you can list the rungs all day; the question is why anyone steps on any of them.

my working theory, drafted at this desk over several thursdays, is that people lie for one of four reasons: fear, gain, kindness, or habit. in roughly that order of moral seriousness, with fear at the heavy end and habit at the dumb-but-hard-to-quit end.

fear is the big one. a person who lies out of fear is, almost always, lying to a person they expect to react badly to the truth. that’s not a moral failure of the liar; that is, frequently, a moral failure of the person being lied to, which is, frankly, a sentence i did not expect to type before lunch. but it stands. if everyone you know lies to you, you might be the variable.

gain is the second-biggest. a person who lies for gain is doing it because the lie pays — money, time, social standing, a postponed deadline. this is, in my own audit, my most common rung. i lie for time. time is, on a friday, the only currency i still have a healthy reserve of, and i protect that reserve aggressively, and not always honestly.

kindness is the third. this is the “your hair looks fine” lie. the “i’m sure they meant well” lie. the “of course i’d come to your wedding alone” lie. these are, on the scoresheet, lies. but they are also the wd-40 of human society. removing them would be like taking the salt out of a recipe.

habit is the fourth and most pathetic. the habit-liar lies because, at some point, lying became easier than the small honest answer, and now the small honest answer feels rude or laborious. i have, on tuesdays, slipped into this rung. i caught myself, last month, telling a barista i was “just popping in” when i had been walking past the cafe for forty minutes specifically to come in. nobody asked. i told her anyway. that’s a habit lie. a small, free-of-charge, warmly-delivered lie. it bought me nothing. i still don’t know why i said it.

how to spot a liar, which i can’t, that’s actually the point

i would love, in this section, to give you a checklist. seven warning signs. five tells. three things to watch in the eyebrows. i can’t. nobody can. the literature on detecting lies, last i checked, sits at roughly coin-flip accuracy for trained professionals, and worse for the rest of us. that’s not me being humble. that’s the data.

what you can do, and what i now do at restaurants and at desks and on phone calls i do answer, is watch for patterns. a single nervous laugh, a single fast denial, a single “i sent it” with the wrong cadence — that’s a tuesday. a person whose denials, deflections, and deferrals all rhyme — that’s a working hypothesis. you collect three of those in a month, on the same person, you have a liar. you collect zero, you have a normal friend. you collect one, you have, statistically, a normal friend on a hard day.

also: trust the receipt. if you have texts, dates, screenshots — the receipt is, on its own, sufficient. you do not need the disputed party to co-sign your memory. a person who disputes photographic evidence is, in that gesture, telling you exactly which rung they currently occupy. you don’t have to argue. you can just nod and let the rung speak for itself.

verdict, we’re all on the chart, the question is which rung

budget meeting let out. carla walked past with her water bottle and a folder. she did not look in. that’s, broadly, a friday good sign. or a friday bad sign. impossible to say.

the leaning pile, as of this morning, is, i estimate, fourteen envelopes thick. seven red. two certified. the phone, between paragraphs four and five, rang once. unknown number. ChatGPT took a transcript. the transcript can wait. it always can.

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