The phrase "a sort of lie" is correct and usable in written English.
It can be used when describing something that is not entirely truthful or is misleading in a vague or ambiguous way.
Example: "What he said was a sort of lie, as it omitted crucial details that changed the context entirely."
Alternatives: "a kind of deception" or "a type of falsehood".
"As long as I quite unashamedly get drunk, have sex and write books like 'A Single Man,' " he writes, "I simply cannot appear before people as a sort of lay minister".
Holroyd warns fellow biographers against what Daniel Defoe called "a sort of lying that makes a great hole in the heart at which, by degrees, the habit of lying enters in".
But what is hard to wrap one's head around is the idea that a certain sort of lie in a certain sort of circumstance is both possibly permissible and possibly impermissible.
Of course there are many ways to lie, and when Romney says he will balance the budget with a 20percentt across-the-board tax cut, he is repeating a subtler sort of lie.
When I was a kid, I always thought the fable about The Boy Who Cried Wolf was just a sort of "don't lie" thing, and not a larger allegory for the state of the news in 2017, but then what do I know.
The other is a very specific sort of lie detector, and no home should be without one.
In an earlier court filing, the prosecution charged that it was Bacanovic who "offered to arrange for Faneuil to receive an additional week of vacation," as a sort of payoff for lying to the authorities.
In Paul Bew's seminal work, "Ireland: The Politics of Enmity 1789-2006," he includes a passage from a magazine article written at the height of the famine: "In a sort of hutch there lay four skeletal children... death-stricken.
In a scene of great technical mastery, a dinner party in London with eight distinct speakers, a child, and every sort of lie and sleazy intrigue, Meek has Adam burn all his British bridges.
