Because of recent events regarding the recall of former events, I decided to hit the dictionary (the wonderful Oxford American Dictionary that resides on my Mac) to confirm my understanding, since “words have power” and we want to use the right words when describing our experiences. Here are the definitions of the 3 most talked-about words on the news channels in the past couple of days:
Misspeak: a verb meaning to express oneself insufficiently, unclearly or inaccurately;
Misconstrue: a verb meaning to interpret something wrongly;
Lie: a verb meaning to intentionally make a false or deceptive statement.
From these definitions it is clear that a lie is not a mistake.
If a person lies and we overlook, excuse or mitigate it, do we become liars? If our children lie, do we excuse it, rationalize it or redefine it? What if our employees lie?
It seems to me that if a person makes a false claim it is not a mere insufficiency or misconstruction on his part. It’s a lie.
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