• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Why would I? I would never even think to look in the book to look for a dollar. I was just writing in my journal for my freshman seminar.

It really offends me that you would accuse me of something like that. I would never do something like that.

The most common response of people who were telling the truth was “No, I didn’t take your dollar.” Unlike the liars, the truth-tellers answered the question directly without any embellishment. As these examples attest, when someone doesn’t directly answer your question, there is a good chance they are hiding something no matter how earnest they may sound.

Let me be clear about that: performatives. Linguists and philosophers have long been intrigued by a language device called a performative. Performatives are statements about statements. In the statement “I promise you that I did not steal the money,” the phrase “I promise you” is a performative. It is simply claiming “I say to you” or “I am uttering the following words to you.” What is interesting about performative statements is that they cannot be assessed on their truthfulness. In the sentence starting with “I promise you,” the claim “I did not steal the money” is not directly asserted. The truth of the phrase is that the speaker is merely saying that he or she promises that they didn’t steal the money. It’s a fine distinction but one used surprisingly frequently.

Toward the end of his term, President Bill Clinton was being hounded by the press concerning rumors of sexual misconduct with a White House aide, Monica Lewinsky. In a January 26, 1998, press conference, Clinton announced:

I’m going to say this again: I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

A naïve human being would think that the president did not have sex with Lewinsky. Actually, the statement he said is true: “I’m going to say this again …” In fact, it is technically correct. He was saying it again. OK, so he later admitted that he had had sexual relations with “that woman” but in the press conference, he was not officially lying.

One of the great baseball pitchers of all time, Roger Clemens, was accused by former teammates of taking performance-enhancing drugs during his baseball career. In a press conference several months before later admitting that he had, in fact, taken drugs, Clemens said:

I want to state clearly and without qualification: I did not take steroids, human growth hormone or any other banned substances at any time in my baseball career or, in fact, my entire life …

There again, you can see that Mr. Clemens was technically honest. He did, in fact, state clearly and without qualification. What he stated was a lie but it was truthfully a statement.

WE ALL TELL lies to ourselves, to our friends, and to the world at large. Most of these are innocent lies intended to avoid hurting others’ feelings or to try to make ourselves look a bit better than we should. In the same way, we are constant victims of deception from friends, politicians, advertisers, and just about everyone else. Lies, of course, are not entirely bad. They make our lives more interesting. As the writer, director, and star of the movie The Invention of Lying, Ricky Gervais, claims, without lies we would have no fiction, no good stories. In other words, without lies and deception, there would be very little need for art, literature, philosophy, and psychology.

One of the primary vehicles for the art of deceiving others is language. Not surprisingly, the language of lies is generally seen in the function words we use. As noted in other chapters, function words are essentially social. They tell us about our relationships with objects, events, and most importantly other people. As we’ve seen, lies ultimately reflect a subtle shift in the relationship between the speaker and the listener. At the moment of deception, the human relationship changes, which is reflected in the function words being used.

CHAPTER 7

The Language of Status, Power, and Leadership

THE MOVIE