I have a new pet peeve
Oh wait, I lied. It isn't new.
...So you know when someone says something that they think is true at the time but then turns out to be wrong or false? When the time changes or the information is shown to be wrong the first words I often hear are, 'Sorry, I lied.'
Since when did being wrong, or misinformed or not in control of some reality turn into lying?
Lying is deliberately asserting something that is false, as a truth. You must make a consciously deceptive choice to produce a lie yet in most of these cases I am seeing, it isn't a lie at all which happens.
There are few things in life that I hate. And while I don't hate lying per se I hate perpetuating its influence. You might ask, 'What in the world did that statement mean?' And I would reply:
One area that I disagree on with my wife in raising our children is how to respond to them when they don't do something that they've promised to do. She will occasionally say that they lied when they don't do x, y or z after saying they would. My position is that this actually reinforces the behavior as it gives them something to grasp on to. I would rather tell them from a positive perspective to try harder to say true things or to do what they've said rather than to push home the negative. Who is right and who is wrong? Hard to say. Most parenting seems to be experimental so we'll have to wait for the data to come back on that one.
Back to my pet peeve though. For all of the adults out there, stop saying you lied unless you really tried to deceive me. We are all often wrong and we all often say things which may have been 100% true at the time only to become false later through our own actions or through forces which we couldn't control at all. Let's reserve lying for the real liars out there and keep mistakes as such.
And as a side note, why in the world are there so many different vowel combinations involved in the various iterations of the word lie?
Lie
Liar
Lying
Maybe the next 200 years of language evolution will bring some consistency to our spelling.