It's true, today is Tell a Lie Day

We all lie, some more than others and we do it for different reasons.

At school, we lied to be socially accepted in our group of friends; we’ve lied to our parents to protect ourselves from punishment- the white lies. But there is also a clan of liars that exhausts the act. Today is Tell A Lie Day; A day where we get immunity to bend the truth.

A lie is a false statement to a person or group made by another person or group who knows it is not the whole truth, intentionally. There are different types of lies though.

We all know someone that lies habitually, chronically and compulsively about everything. The person who’ll come to the office on Monday morning to find colleagues conversing about their great weekend at the Cape Town Jazz Festival, and he or she will add their two cents in the conversation by lying she was also there. “Yea I was also there, I liked Erykha Badu’s entrance on stage- it was so beautiful” says the pathological liar.

Then there is the Bold-faced liar. The person that will tell a lie that everyone knows is a lie. Most of our politicians have mastered art of the Bold-face. There are also people that fabricate the things they say. You find a lot of eye witnesses at crime scenes that do this.

The history of lying is really unknown, but in the 2009 Ricky Gervais movieThe Invention of Lying, Gervais challenges and pokes fun at its ‘invention’.  Gervais’ character, a dejected Mark Bellison tells the first lie at a bank when the teller informs him that the computers are down, and asks him how much money he has in his account. 

Bellison originally had $300, but says to the  teller he has $500 more in the account. The teller gives him the $800 assuming the computer has made a mistake. Bellison continues lying about almost everything in the movie, but in the end confesses all, and it is the truth that gives him his peace and happiness.

Lying can help as an emergency exit in tight situations, but it always finds a way of catching up to you. So today, lie. But just remember you’re the one that made the bed.