“All brides are beautiful." "So you were lying!”
- All brides are beautiful, but certainly not because only the pretty ones get married. They are beautiful because each bride is a star, dressed up glamorously, beaming with joy, and her groom sees it and feels it. If you cannot see it, you have no heart, and your eyes may also need a checkup. On the other hand, “There are no small roles, only small actors,” is a line that directors dispense to actors only when giving out small roles.
Guerilla Tip: When a heavy friend is off to a party and asks how he looks, he looks great.
- Recently when Shevy and I were eating asparagus, she told me she had a friend who eats asparagus without, you know, a funny smell later. Never having heard such people existed, I asked in reflex who this friend was. Of course, she did not want to say and I apologized for the stupid question. Over time, I had found my own way to avoid such invitations to name names.
Guerilla Tip: Instead of gossiping about a friend or saying, “It’s someone you know but I can’t tell you,” say the opposite, “It’s someone you don’t know.”
To be sure, this is another white lie. For the sake of the story, no one will get to know whom the story is about, because no one needs to know. Sorry, but it is one of those daily questions of ethics where you can take a white lie on yourself rather than naming names or teasing someone with gossip that you will not take to its end.
Writer Antoine de St.-Exupery of The Little Prince fame said the key to keeping a secret is not letting on that you have a secret.
- Once upon a time, a tragedy began when a princess refused to tell a white lie. In the opening scene of Shakespeare’s King Lear, a vain king rewards his two older daughters for laying it on thick and punishes his youngest for being honest to a fault. Self-righteous Princess Cordelia cannot find any gray area between imitating her lying sisters and expressing herself without mirth or mercy. It wasn’t pretty and didn’t end well.
Cordelia was a real character. If only she had asked, someone could have told her shrewdly to get with the real world: This honesty thing, it’s overrated. So all brides are beautiful whether or not they are.
Guerilla Tip: Choose your words in anticipation of the results you are after. You are too smart to rely on the purity of your intentions alone. No taming of the shrewd here.
Everything you say carries an underlying meaning that produces results good and bad. That meaning is a message more important than the literal words. So the most important part of speech is not nouns or verbs, but results.
- Guerilla Tip: The rules for a white lie are strict—It has to be rare, small and harmless; but above all, it must be intended solely for keeping peace with friends and family, and better do just that.
Any sort of trickery fails the test. Similarly, if a white lie that seemed harmless ends up hurting, it was no white lie and better not be repeated.
- When my kids were very young, my night classes after work meant that my wife had already put the kids to bed before I got back home. Since Alex’s fourth birthday fell on a class night, I stepped out to call him before bedtime, and pointed that out. Since I made no mention of raising my hand to leave class, he asked if I got the teacher’s permission. For simplicity, I said yes.
The next day I wanted to be clear and explained that adults don’t actually raise their hands to take a break. Stepping out quietly is allowed for grownups. While it was true I was permitted to leave class, it was not true that I asked. All a four-year-old understood was the black and white issue: I said I asked permission but did not. Checkmate: “So you were lying,” and he got me there.
Technically, it was a lie, but a white lie told only for simplicity, not to trick someone—a valuable lesson for him. The lesson for me was that Alex did not need things simplified at four as he needed at three, God bless him.
Guerilla Tip: Teach kids never to lie where it matters.
To be precise, the vicious activities below do not pass as white lies. They fail the smell test badly on the first whiff.
- Playing a practical joke is vicious.
- Making a joke at someone’s expense is vicious.
- Ridicule is vicious.
- Bullying by using the truth, distorting the truth or lying is vicious.
- An unusual seminar on conducting hiring interviews taught me a lesson on lying: If you are interviewing a candidate who matches a job well and the chemistry is good, ask him if he ever finds he has to lie. Then sit back and listen to the revealing response.
Guerilla Tip: Anyone who says he never lies reveals a pathological liar you would never want to hire.
Look for the authenticity in answers like, “Occasionally I have to tell a bit of a lie to avoid embarrassing someone, even myself.” Also, the seminar speaker believed there are two camps of people who dislike being lied to: One camp feels a lie is just wrong, unethical; the other experiences a lie as an insult to the intelligence. The speaker said a work team is best made up of those all in the same camp.
- When we were married, my wife and I attended a concert of new music by a friend of hers. We were amazed at how little we understood of the original pieces or why the audience went wild for the music. So what could we say to our friend after the show and still feel authentic? We could hardly say we loved the music we didn’t follow, or anything of the sort. Such lies would have been awful. Instead we came up with halfway measures, not phony at all, that the performing composer heard as compliments. You can do the same when your kids perform, too.
Guerilla Tip: “Wow, we were amazed. The audience went wild. You must be so proud and exhausted, too!”
