pathological lying meaning — an explainer, sort of

on the digital fridge there is a post-it that says meaning, crossed out, and underneath it the word practice. that is the working pathological lying meaning in this household. you don’t define it. you do it. on the wall of insults a stranger has typed coward in lowercase. i moved it to the bottom row.

writing this from the desk, between an inbox that beeps every nine minutes and a thermostat war ongoing since february. boss is two doors down on a vendor call he scheduled himself into. that gives me, by the wall clock, until twelve fifteen.

so. let us attempt the pathological lying meaning question on a wednesday, with a coffee gone cold twice.

pathological lying meaning: a working translation. it is the habit, more than the diagnosis, of saying things that are not true to people who weren’t asking, in volumes small enough to feel mannerly, often enough to register as a personality trait. the meaning lives in the practice. you find it by watching the wednesday, not by reading a tab.

MEANING. CROSSED. OUT. PRACTICE. WRITTEN. UNDER.

that is the post-it. that is the whole post in five words. you have not left the page, so you want the long version. i charge nothing extra. that is the problem.

pathological lying meaning, my working translation

here is how i would tape it to the side of the seventh microwave, if microwaves still existed in this apartment in operational form. the pathological lying meaning i can defend at this desk has four parts.

one: the lie is not strategic. nobody is getting rich. it does not improve the liar’s standing and usually worsens it on a five-year horizon. two: it is reflexive — it arrives before the truth has finished putting on its shoes. three: the audience does not benefit. the lie is not protecting anyone, including the liar, who would be better off telling the small mundane truth.

four — and this is the one i keep coming back to — the lie is part of a pattern. one lie is a tuesday. forty lies in a wallet of receipts is a practice. that is the move from occurrence to meaning. one is a story you tell at the bar. forty is what you are.

i am not a clinician. i looked it up the way a man looks up the weather before walking outside even though he can already see it. for the clinical-shaped reading, see my pillar on the word liar.

meaning vs practice, a small linguistic war

dictionaries like meanings. a meaning is a little box you can carry to a debate club, hand to a referee, point at smugly. it is what people who have not actually done the thing prefer to talk about. portable, by design.

practice is messier. practice is what the thing actually is, in motion, on a tuesday, with the audience composed of one bored person who is also tired. practice fits, badly, in a wallet of receipts and a folder labeled “evidence” you stopped opening in 2021.

so when somebody asks me for the pathological lying meaning, the honest move is: the meaning is in the practice. mike the warehouse philosopher put it shorter into a third pint, and i quote because i wrote it on a coaster: “the meaning of a thing is what it does. that’s it.” mike has not filed his taxes since 2019. on this, mike is correct.

the wall of insults agrees with me, mostly

brief explanation for new readers: the wall of insults is a digital wall in this apartment. people send small unkind sentences and they appear on it, in a font i did not pick. it was a tip jar tier that got out of hand. around ninety entries. one is in a language i cannot identify. one says, simply, refrigerator, which i think was meant for somebody else.

this morning i opened the wall and saw, near the top, a fresh one that read liar in lowercase. typed without capitals, like a permanent address. i moved it to the bottom row. not because it was wrong. because it was, on a wednesday, more than i could carry past 10:18am.

the wall is useful for the pathological lying meaning conversation, because the wall is a record. it does not soften the syntax in your favor over time. it is what the inside of an honest person’s head looks like. mine has decor. no edits.

how the meaning collapses on a tuesday

let us run a tuesday. fictional, but only in the way the weather forecast is fictional — broadly accurate, with names changed.

9:48am. someone in the elevator says how are you. truth: i did not sleep, i ate cereal for dinner, i owe dave three hundred dollars. i say good, you?. the lie is small. nobody dies. and yet, by the strictest reading of the pathological lying meaning we are drafting today, that lie is in the family. low-stakes untruth, reflexive, audience did not benefit. same eyes as its cousins.

1:38pm. somebody asks, in a chat thread, if i have read the deck. i have not. i type yeah, lots to dig into. there will be no digging. that lie sits in the chat for nine months, until the deck gets referenced in a meeting and i have to look surprised — which i do, because i am, surprised this is the meeting where the lie comes back.

this is what i mean by the pathological lying meaning living in the practice. the dictionary has one row, abstract. the practice has forty rows, dated, slightly stained.

when the meaning is useful and when it is decor

i want to be fair to dictionaries. they have a job. the pathological lying meaning is useful when you are across from a person who has been doing this to you for three years and you have not, until this minute, had a name for the pattern. naming is half the medicine. naming is what gets you off the couch and into the hallway.

the meaning becomes decor when it gets used as a weapon — deployed in a tuesday argument by someone who read one substack and now wants every disagreement to be a clinical event. the word becomes furniture. the furniture stops doing anything. there is, i’m told, a whole effect about people who learn a word and immediately overuse it past the point of sense, flagged in a tab labeled the effect that explains a lot of internet behavior. tab seventeen. i am at tab forty-six.

rule under the post-it: use the meaning to find the practice. don’t use the meaning to replace it.

verdict, the meaning lives in the practice, ruefully

so the post-it stays. meaning crossed out, practice written under. the pathological lying meaning i would tape to the inside of a microwave i no longer own — the seventh was the most recent casualty, the kitchen is appliance-light — is short. four parts. and the recommendation that you look at a wednesday before you look at a dictionary.

which brings me to the take. this week’s is the microwave plate doesn’t need to spin. the plate is the dictionary. it spins to feel useful, to fulfill an expectation, and the food would heat fine without it. the meaning of a behavior is the spin. the practice is the heat.

for the heavier passes, sit with the line i refuse to cross on the word pathological liar, an earlier attempt at the pathological liar definition, or the compulsive liar definition. those are the cluster’s heavier coats. this one is the post-it.

a calendar invite just popped up for something called “alignment touch base.” i don’t know what alignment we are touching, base of, but i have seven minutes to wrap and minimize.

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