A Remarkably Easy and Innovative Way to Lie and Get Away With It
There’s a name for this and you may be doing a good job of it. But you can correct this fault.
I met, my friend, Jake at the local coffee shop for breakfast. Across the counter from us sat three local chicken farmers. Jake knew them. He introduced each one to me by asking them a question. ‘How many chickens do you have?’ First one said, ‘forty,’ next one, ‘thirty-eight,’ finally the last one, ‘fifty.’ Of course, each farmer counted in the thousands of chickens. Jake turned to me, ‘Richard, how many chickens do you have?’ ‘Thirteen.’ And I meant thirteen. Jake knew I had a little chicken house on my one-acre plot.
The slickest way in the world to lie is to tell the right amount of truth at the right time and then shut up.… Robert A. Heinlein
I have a simple solution to stop what Robert A. Heinlein says about this kind of lie. More on this later.
Yes, the little sin of omission slapped me on my face as I slurped my coffee. The three farmers left to tend their thousands of chickens. Never saw them again.
