Recreational lying - CLASSIC or DUD

Lying about trivial things as compulsive practise for lying about more important things in life = dud, dud, dud.

It's very hard to tell the difference a lot of the time. I don't mind being wound up, but being lied to about anything important fucks me off on a basic level more than anything else.

And leave off Colin. He's really very nice when you get to know him. ;-)

You could always have the best of both worlds and weave a yarn that's just this side of believable, and then pop the bubble with the truth at the end. (It's best to play up the fantastical nature of such yarns, in my experience.)

I think recreational lying is fun. I think concocting a lie which contains evidence of its own lie-ness but still managing to convince a listener of its veracity is top. A baroque Baran classic involving the Dave Clark Five comes to mind, but I won't ruin that one for anyone else who may be bewitched by same in the future.

(Isn't this like the bit in Labyrinth where the two doorknockers argue about which one always tells the truth and which one always lies?)

Kate, did you know when I first met Jane I said I'd written "Maybe she was born with it... Maybe it's Maybeline!" and was only at PA waiting for an enormous royalty cheque? Pointless but joyful.

You're just jealous cause women can get to make choices like that, while men just get old and bitter and mutter about how their Art is misunderstood, instead.

When Charlie was at PA he got his head stuck between two office desks, caught by a computer cable. Everyone thought he was on drugs and he couldn't get out for about 5 minutes, shouting and being pulled by a fat bloke and Jo M. Hilarious, like a sitcom. After that everyone called him block (as in blockhead). Don't tell him.

I also convinced a hairdresser once that I was a journalist from NYC. And if anyone of you have heard my Americken accent - I kept that up for over half an hour. I'm not sure if she was convinced. But why would I lie?

To be honest, I don't know.

LARKS THO!

Yet another reason I'm convinced that you're not real, Mark. ;-)

He once told a friend of ours that my mum is Syrian. Why? Who knows. The friend believed him, the fool. Then told me that my mum was Syrian. Who told you that? I said. Pete, he said. Well then, I said.

There are many many more. I'm sure he will tell you himself.

5: On ILE, the BSE Jelly lie. (Not very convincing, but a fair grain of truth possibly contained in it vis a vis gelatine).

4: Clare Short stole my taxi. A variation on original from five years agao called Kenneth Clarke stole my taxi. The addition of Clare Short though adds a socialist radical frisson to the stealing.

3: Angelina Jolie was born on the same day as Emma. (She might even still believe that one).

2: At a UK Webloggers meet the classic Deptford sewage is 13% blood. This spun off from a good half hour conversation about me being a sewage farm worker, going through the various techniques of filtration used including - as Tim says above - Dave Clarke's Five grills (a filter system where the sewage goes through tighter and tighter grills to be strained out. Diamond rings tend to get caught in the second grill). Stevie and Tim looked on agog.

1: The time when I looked myself in the eye. A long complicated story involving a cosmetic eye operation and hinging on the fact that "when you are young your optic nerve has a fair bit of slack". The lie ends with "There I was looking myself in the eye at a distance of half an inch. It was like looking into infinity."

The problem with such lies is that people never believe me when I tell the truth - such as me being too short to be an Ewok and that Inspector Clouseau film with Alan Arkin in instead of Peter Sellers.

My only repetitive lie is that my girlfriend is in fact my sister. This has worked with two different women; despite there being little or no resemblance.

Does anything said while trying to pull count as recreational fibbing?

Gah, that's the most mind-melting thing anyone has said to me all week. Looking yourself in the eye. I'm going to be unable to think about anything else for the next month. What *would* happen?

Of course there is that great story about wearing upside down prism glasses where everything looks upside down. After a few days if you wear them constantly the brain switches and sees everything the right way up. Until you take the glasses off.....

It's like when you're on acid, they tell you never to look into a mirror, because that will give you a bad trip. It always does. Cause you get that "I'm looking into eternity, I'm looking into my own soul" feeling.

You know, I can go crosseyed, and I can even go crosseyed looking in two directions at once, but I've never been able to look at my own eyeball, because my stupid nose was always in the way. Now maybe if I cut off my nose... Hmmmm....

Never do acid with patterned carpet or persian rugs either.

what a silly man.

I stopped taking drugs shortly after that. Really.

Work out for yourself how the above factors came together.

Looking yourself in the eye
Robert Elms is a cunt
Taking the piss in an elevator

-- Ally C (allycook9...), July 11th, 2001.

This is exactly the kind of thing I was just describing on the Foreigners! What have you learned about the British? thread.

I don't consider it lying. It's more like reverse sarcasm. Lying is dud.

First window: teacher asks names of new class

Second window: several children give ridiculous, absurd non-names

Third window: boy says 'Danny' and everyone stops and stares

Fourth window: begins 'Six months earlier' and shows a couple of class members laying roses at the grave of 'Danny' who lived 1995-2006

I'm a really good liar.

But why would I lie?

To be honest, I don't know.

otm

That wheelchair thing, reminds me of the woman who hired a stripper to impersonate her at her high school reunion (this story is on YouTube). This is not a "lie", it's a practical joke.

I had a mate in primary school whose intelligence and imagination wildly exceeded that of his classmates. Among the things he told us were:

- He came from a broken home, his Dad was in gaol for throwing a pint of beer at the judge during a court hearing
- He had been born while his mother was on skis whilst fleeing from police in the Hungarian wilderness
- That he and his brothers had spliced and pasted back together a load of Atari computer game tapes, with amazing results. One game that got "created" from this hotchpotch had involved having to escape from a moving lorry compartment while some chick took her kit off. He'd have shown us the game had his mum not confiscated it for being too rude
- He worked in a science lab after school where they had nearly figured out how to turn lead into gold
- At the same lab he had once experimented by injecting himself with rat's blood and that he was slowly turning into a rat as a result (the whole class believed this one)
- God had spoken to him and told him he was going to destroy the world because he was angry with Maggie Thatcher; that he had been chosen as the last to die and our best mate was the second to last. I would've been second to last, only I accidentally killed a small spider while leaning against a tree in the playground.

That's like the kind of things I told my little brother when I was ten and he was six.

we must've been about 7-9 years old.

My dad loved to tell me lies when I was a kid. One involved a woman who was 157 years old. Of course I told my friends who told me I was a big fat liar. I assured them I was telling the truth cause my dad had said so. *sigh*

i came here to say that recreational lying makes my blood boil but i'm doing a 180 and now saying that dog latin's classmate is my new personal hero

Classic, and a requirement on ILX as far as I'm concerned/can tell.

there was this very flamboyant Marilyn Manson-obsessed dude i had a class with in high school who claimed that he was one of the stars of the movie L.I.E.

you should have told him his performance sucked

I'm a really good bad liar.

Which can be a good thing, as it means I avoid doing it where possible, but sometimes such situations are UNavoidable. And then the world explodes.

You should have just said you were a good liar. I would have believed you.

had a mate in primary school whose intelligence and imagination wildly exceeded that of his classmates. Among the things he told us were:

- He came from a broken home, his Dad was in gaol for throwing a pint of beer at the judge during a court hearing
- He had been born while his mother was on skis whilst fleeing from police in the Hungarian wilderness
- That he and his brothers had spliced and pasted back together a load of Atari computer game tapes, with amazing results. One game that got "created" from this hotchpotch had involved having to escape from a moving lorry compartment while some chick took her kit off. He'd have shown us the game had his mum not confiscated it for being too rude
- He worked in a science lab after school where they had nearly figured out how to turn lead into gold
- At the same lab he had once experimented by injecting himself with rat's blood and that he was slowly turning into a rat as a result (the whole class believed this one)
- God had spoken to him and told him he was going to destroy the world because he was angry with Maggie Thatcher; that he had been chosen as the last to die and our best mate was the second to last. I would've been second to last, only I accidentally killed a small spider while leaning against a tree in the playground.

― dog latin, 23 June 2009 14:07 (11 months ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

Amazing. Poll?
zing.

uh? extra zing there obviously a survivor from pre cuddlestein days. bizarre.

met a girl i liked at a club last saturday, while fairly wasted. we had a bit of a chat and it was fun and we added each other on fb, despite typically her having a bf. anyway messaged back and forth this week and she said at the end of the first message "ps how's the weather this week?"

so i was kinda like "oh yeah haha the weather" and asked what was up with her mentioning that, saying if it was a private joke i couldn't remember it.

and she said i told her i was a weather presenter on british radio and talked about it at length, giving examples of my sign offs etc.

I've never been able to tell a convincing lie, so I don't lie.

x-post - LOL

Lying for fun is better than lying for profit, but imo the fun stops if you never let the other person in on the joke.

I drove my wife home from an outpatient procedure on Tuesday and she was pretty zonked on the good drugs. After she'd had lunch and a nap and was starting to snap out of it, I asked her "Who was that guy who gave you a ride home? I thought you were going to call me when it was time to come pick you up." Had her going for a few minutes.

Ha.

I have for no apparent reason lied about some really mundane things recently and then got stuck making up more stupid mundane details to answer questions about it and thinking "fuck, why did I say that, I can't just say 'ah actually no, I lied about this really mundane thing for no reason'"

(e.g. I was asked "are you still living in xxx" and I said "yeah", I guess cz I couldn't be bothered to talk about how I moved like a year ago but I don't really know, but then people were "oh, how is it living there?" "did you bus? when is your last bus?" etc and, gah)

I have no idea why, maybe I felt I wasn't quite sociopathic enough already

lying to friends to laugh at their gullibility or whatever = classic
lying to strangers for the hell of it = dud, total weirdo behaviour

I never lie

I bet I know which island you're from.

oh no "weirdo behaviour"...

I end up getting bored/not feeling like I ought to be there when I go out with co-workers. I like them well enough, but I never chose these people as friends. I end up getting so bored and unable to think of charming/witty/interesting things to say, so I just make bullshit up about how an ex-coworker killed a swan in front of me one lunchtime before he went travelling, or how I have a birthmark on my chest shaped exactly like Richard Branson's upper arm. The fact they tend to believe me is the most worrying part.

― broodje kroket (dog latin), Friday, 3 June 2011 16:02 (6 days ago)

I also told them that where I live they put people with abnormalities in a freakshow, but that I was impressed how the pub had hired a guy with a squid-like face to go round the toilets sucking up old bits of chewing gum.

you should write a sitcom

I drove my wife home from an outpatient procedure on Tuesday and she was pretty zonked on the good drugs. After she'd had lunch and a nap and was starting to snap out of it, I asked her "Who was that guy who gave you a ride home? I thought you were going to call me when it was time to come pick you up." Had her going for a few minutes.

Heh, I do this kind of thing a fair amount. Only with my girlfriend, though, and usually for no more than a few beats before I fess up.

how often do you drug her

and why do you do it

aimless otm

Oh this can be so much fun. The main victim of my recreational lying is my sister, whom i've told incredible stories. but usually after about 10mns of making up ridiculous stuff, i end up laughing. i love it when at the start of your lie the person you're talking to still doubts what you're saying, but the fact that you keep going on and on ends up convincing him that you're telling the truth.

I was introduced at work recently like "this is hazel, you can't believe anything he says." like, totally matter-of-fact brief introduction, then on to the next employee. so, it's a problem.

(e.g. I was asked "are you still living in xxx" and I said "yeah", I guess cz I couldn't be bothered to talk about how I moved like a year ago but I don't really know, but then people were "oh, how is it living there?" "did you bus? when is your last bus?" etc and, gah)

I was thinking about this recently. I lied because I thought saying that I'd moved would result in long awkward conversations involving giving out more of my address than I'd like, discussing my rent costs (dude had prior form for this), and being hassled abt seeing every single one of his band's gigs now I lived closer to town. In fact, my quick "mmhm" resulted in 20 Questions but when I saw him next I said "oh, I moved, I'm now in ___" and he was like "oh, right, that's better than the last place" and that was the end of the conversation.

I've grunted mundane monosyllabic untruths on another couple of occasions in an attempt to shut the conversation down faster and give out the minimum of personal information, and on both of those occasions it also prolonged the agony. So, don't do that, as I hope I've now learnt.

(was searching ILX for lying-induced disasters, but apparently I have the only dishonesty mishap on all of ILX)

i'm doing quite a bit of recreational lying when out these days. i can't be bothered to tell ppl what my real job is (it's kind of boring and i get asked pointless questions) so i make up improbable jobs. it's incredible to see what ppl will believe.

http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/05/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-slut/371773/

this sociological study of slut-shaming in college dorms/sororities by armstrong and hamilton has been making the rounds

The rampant slut-shaming, Armstrong found, was only a symptom of the women’s entrenched classism. But more importantly, the allegations of sluttiness had little to do with real-life behavior. The woman with the most sexual partners in the study, a rich girl named Rory, also had the most sterling reputation—largely because she was an expert at concealing her sexual history.

“Rory was going to lie till the day she died,” Armstrong said. “She would only have sex with guys who didn't know each other. She constantly misrepresented what she was doing and didn't tell people where she was going.”

quoted not re sluttiness but re total compartmentalization - i've been kind of preoccupied for years now with the possibility of people having zero knowledge of the other people in your life, it's kind of terrifying that there are people who pull it off deliberately

Rory otm. It's nobody's business what she does in her life.