twofingersandathumb

I was chatting with a friend who is temporarily residing in another state where she is not yet familiar with the rules of the road and speed limit signs are not clearly posted. As such, she found herself pulled over by a state trooper for speeding (her first moving violation ever.)

She lamented to me about how she missed driving in California, where there is a posted highway speed and then there’s the understood policy about driving as fast as is safe given the flow of traffic. People exceed the freeway speed limits all the time in California and can go for years or for a lifetime without being cited.

I pointed out that, although people drive with the flow of traffic, any speed over the posted limits is breaking the law. If the posted limit is 65 mph and the driver is clocking 66 mph, the driver is breaking the law, technically.

My friend disagreed, saying that few people get pulled over for going 70 mph or more. “No one drives sixty-five on the freeway in California unless they’re ninety-two and a half years old or driving an eighteen-wheeler fully loaded or it’s pouring rain, and even then it’s iffy.”

I agreed with her comment, but then reiterated that the posted limit is the law, and the enforcement agencies give us a lot of grace by looking the other way most of the time. But if we’re driving faster than what’s allowed, we are breaking the law, whether or not we are caught. The citing does not mean we’ve broken the law, it’s simply one of the consequences.

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.