Grammar girl here, I'm a neon fugitive and you can think of me as your friendly guide

to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff. Today

we'll talk about the difference between lying and misleading people, and then because

people can use numbers to lie in mislead, we'll talk about percent and percentages. Philosophers

as far back as Greek and Roman antiquity debated the meaning of truth. While what constitutes

truth has always been controversial, these days it seems like the line between what's

true and what's not has become increasingly hard to tease out. So let's look at what

it means to lie versus mislead and how it plays out linguistically. Though it might

seem subtle, there's a crucial difference in the act of lying versus the act of misleading.

Lying involves stating something that you know to be false, and a lie is still a lie

regardless of whether your target buys it. Misleading someone on the other hand can often

be accomplished without explicitly saying something false, and is more about nudging

someone in the direction of what you want them to think. Unlike lying, if your target

doesn't buy your misleading statement, then you haven't misled anyone. In other words,

both lying and misleading are forms of deceptive behavior, but how they're accomplished linguistically

and what's at stake are quite different. For instance, think about a situation where

squiggly and ardvarke are talking about how much they each want a chocolate bar, and

they generally keep chocolate bars in the pantry. If squiggly tells ardvarke there are

no more chocolate bars in the pantry, despite knowing full well there's one left, squiggly

asserts something that's patently false. In other words, squiggly is lying, so he can

grab the chocolate bar for himself later. In contrast, squiggly's only misleading

ardvarke if he says something that's not itself false. For example, he might emphasize

...