persistent lying — 1 fairly sure investigation

the fridge holds a milk that may have expired, which makes it schrodinger’s fridge until i open it, which is a reason not to. persistent lying, the screen explains, is a pattern. the wall of insults agrees. ice cream is breakfast. so is silence. so is the phone call i did not make today.

so the question on the desk this morning is whether the small not-saids and the small not-dones have, between them, accumulated into something the dictionary would file under a single sturdy adjective. persistent. the word is asking about duration, not motive. how long the thing has been going on. how often. how reliably. the dictionary, on this rung, is taking attendance.

at the desk. carla in the all-hands on the third floor, doors closed, the kind of meeting where someone brings a folder of bullet points nobody asked for. i have, generously, until eleven.

i pulled up the search bar before opening anything else. persistent lying. the autocomplete suggested, in helpful descending order, three other phrases i have already filed posts on. that should, in a fair court, count as a clue about the author. i ignored it. i opened a new tab. (this is, technically, a 47th tab.)

here’s the thing about persistent lying as a phrase: it is not asking why somebody lies. it is asking how long they have been doing it. it is the timekeeping cousin of the heavier diagnostic words. the heavier words — pathological, compulsive — describe the engine. persistent describes the odometer. they sometimes ride in the same car. they are not the same word.

which means, before we go further, the heavy lifting of this post is in the difference between the timing word and the engine words. and, on a tuesday, that difference is what i would like, briefly, to hold up to the light.

for the long-form rung-chart, the place where all five categories of liar live and bicker, the master file is over at the working liar field guide on this site. i refer to it occasionally myself, in the way a man checks a ledger he wrote in last spring and barely recognises.

persistent lying, the version i wrote at the desk

let me put this in plain language. persistent lying is a stopwatch question. it asks: has this person been lying about roughly the same thing, in roughly the same way, for long enough that a stranger could draw a graph?

that is different from the question pathological asks, which is “are the lies elaborate and frequently pointless”. that is different again from the question compulsive asks, which is “do the lies fire under pressure, the way a sneeze fires when the dust does”. the timing word does not care about the engine. the timing word cares about the calendar.

so a person can be a strategic liar — somebody who lies for clear, nameable reasons — and also a persistent liar, if the clear nameable reasons have been showing up on the same wednesday for two years. that is, in fact, the most common combination in the wild. it is, by my own admittedly unreliable accounting, the rung i am closest to. i lie about the pile. i have been lying about the pile, in roughly the same words, with roughly the same shrug, for roughly the time it takes a small dog to grow up.

for the term that focuses on chronicity rather than duration — same family, slightly different x-axis — see the entry on what the word habitual is doing in the same paragraph. and for the engine that fires under pressure, the involuntary cousin, see the working note on the compulsive end of the chart.

the schrodinger’s fridge, which is its own kind of lie

now. the fridge. the schrodinger’s fridge is the small white object three steps from this desk that may or may not contain a viable carton of milk. the carton has a date. the date has, in the strict reading, passed. the carton has not been opened. the milk inside the carton is, until the carton is opened, both fine and not fine. i am, in the meantime, drinking my coffee black, which is, in turn, a small lie i tell myself about preference.

this is, on a strict reading, a lie. the lie is structural. the carton is doing the work for me. as long as the carton is closed, i have not been told the milk is off. as long as i have not been told, i have not refused to act. as long as i have not refused to act, i am, technically, a man with options. opening the fridge would collapse the wave function and turn me into a man with chores.

and here is the persistent part. this is not a tuesday. the fridge has been schrodinger’s fridge since approximately late march. the carton, by my count, has been the same carton for three weeks. the lie i am telling myself about my own pantry-management has, in that sense, been running long enough to have a small graph attached. that is what the timing word is asking. that is what persistent means in practice.

the wall of insults that audits me weekly

across the desk, in a folder i pretend is for tax receipts, lives the digital wall — the wall of insults i keep, in image form, of every reader who has paid five dollars to call me something true. the wall has rules. one entry per week. the entries are read on sunday morning, because sunday morning is the only morning a man who lives alone can be insulted to his face without it ruining the rest of the week.

at least three of the most recent entries have used a version of the word i’m currently writing about. persistent. “you are a persistent disappointment”. “you are persistently late on the mail”. “you are persistently wrong about cold pizza”. (that last one is, on a strict reading, libel; cold pizza is breakfast and hot pizza is dinner and i will write that on the wall myself for free.) the readers, in their five-dollar way, are not commenting on motive. they are commenting on duration. they have been reading for long enough to draw a graph.

this is, in its small way, the post’s central observation. the people who know you longest are the only ones in a position to use the timing word about you accurately. a stranger can call you a liar. a friend can call you a strategic one. only somebody who has been watching for several seasons gets to put the word persistent in front. that’s earned. it’s not a compliment, but it’s earned.

and the people on the wall, having paid for the privilege, have earned it. (the seventh microwave, on the counter, is, in its own way, a persistent appliance — i have killed six and intend to kill a seventh.)

the phone i dodged again, a small persistence

the phone, while i was writing the previous section, rang once. unknown number. the same area code as last tuesday. i did not pick up. the voicemail is, of course, full. it has been full since approximately august. the man who calls keeps calling. i keep not answering. that is, in the strict reading, a persistent lie of omission.

not picking up is not, in itself, a lie. not picking up repeatedly, with the deliberate intention of letting the unknown number conclude i am unreachable, while i am, in fact, three steps from the device — that is, in the small print of the dictionary, dishonesty by routine. the routine has been running, by my count, since late summer. that is the timing word. that is the rung.

now, here’s where i would like to introduce a distinction the search bar has not yet thought to ask about. there is a difference between a person who is a persistent liar and a person who is a working textbook fool by every measurable definition. a fool can be a fool on a tuesday. a fool can be a fool only on tuesdays. a fool can be earnest, occasional, well-meaning, and broadly truthful and still be the fool of the room. persistence is not a requirement of foolishness. persistence is, however, the only requirement of the word i am currently typing about myself.

so the man at this desk is, on the timing axis, a persistent liar of the small-omission rung. he is also, on the engine axis, a strategic liar of the financial-self-preservation rung. and he is, on the social axis, the kind of mild fool who lets the cartons in his fridge make decisions for him. all three of these can be true at once. they share an apartment.

when “persistent” sounds like a virtue

here is the small joke the language is playing on us. persistent, in almost every other context in the english-speaking world, is a compliment. persistent runners. persistent inventors. persistent salesmen. persistent friends who keep texting after you have not, for two months, replied. you write the word on a child’s school report and the parents go home pleased. you write the word in front of “lying” and suddenly everyone is on the witness stand.

this is, in its way, the central absurdity. the same trait — keep doing the thing — is, depending on the noun it modifies, a virtue or a verdict. a man who persists in trying is a hero. a man who persists in not opening the mail is a person the dictionary is now writing footnotes about. for cinematic context, the public reference most people reach for on the virtuous side is the 2005 will smith film about a salesman who refuses to give up on a stockbroker internship; the same word, slightly different consequences.

i find this funny on a tuesday. i find it less funny on a sunday morning, when the wall is being read aloud and the word shows up four entries in a row. but on a tuesday, with carla in the all-hands, the word still scans as roughly fair. i am persistently doing the small thing that i do. so are you. the question, as ever, is which thing.

PERSISTENT. IS. A. CALENDAR. NOT. A. CHARACTER.

verdict, persistence is the only thing i do reliably

so. the working answer to the question of whether the man at this desk is a persistent liar is, on a strict reading, yes. the lying is small. the lying is, by the standards of the engine words, dull. but the lying has, in its small dull way, been showing up on the same wednesday for long enough to draw a graph. that is what the timing word is asking. on the timing axis, i answer to the word.

the comfort, such as it is, is that persistent on its own does not climb you up the rung-chart. you can be a persistent strategic liar — a man who has been telling his landlord the kitchen sink is “doing better” once a season for two years — and still be, in the engine sense, on the most ordinary rung available. the timing word is sideways. it does not move you up. it just tells the room how long you have been at it.

which means, in the kind of news the screen calls a verdict and i call a friday: i have been lying small, lying often, lying for plain reasons, and lying for long enough that a respectable graph could now be drawn. the graph is, however, flat. that is the only thing on this desk that is reliably flat.

↑