White lies, polite lies [ Reading & Writing / Communication ]
… . Eighteenth-century authors of advice manuals thus had to walk a fine line between recommending honesty towards oneself and politeness towards others, while novelists grappled with their characters’ attempts to attain or reject a … all kinds of lies, although he accepted that there were exceptions: he excluded ‘jocose lies’ that are self-evident and uttered without any intention to deceive from his list of lies. White lies, however, are arguably meant … a ‘criminal falsehood’, a ‘charge of falsehood’ or simply ‘a fiction’. 3 If James Boswell is to be believed, Johnson himself generally used the term rather loosely in his own third sense in conversation, indicating a story that was not …
Conversation | Falsehood | Lies | Politeness
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