On the drive from my hotel to the restaurant, we made awkward small talk during which I couldn't help telling a couple of small untruths.
What makes the small untruths "resonate," as the consultants say, is that they were embedded in a latticework of infinitely more consequential untruths, willful errors, and outright lies.
As she catalogs examples of artistic license that "The Third Man" took with reality, Dr. Timmermann proceeds from the assumption that small untruths serve the larger Truth.
BEN RATLIFF CHRIS MORRISSEY "North Hero" (Sunnyside) One of the small untruths in circulation in the current jazz scene is the notion of an irreparable fault line between conservative and progressive factions, one side holding fast to definitions and the other doing its best to ignore them.
They may say that they filled their tank of gas for their car when in reality they put $10 worth of gas in the car; they may have stopped at a fast food drive-through and said that they went out to lunch with a colleague, and told other small untruths designed to impress.
The sooner you clear away these sorts of small untruths, the better.
You can accept one larger truth that guides your interpretation of all of the smaller untruths, accept a vision of the future that is so bright that it drives away the shadows of the various dark acts of your own time and place.
Instead, they're small corners cut, intimidation applied or minor untruths told that add up to one toxic car-buying experience.
For the tens of thousands of Iraqis who work for the United States in Iraq, daily life is an elaborate balancing act of small, memorized untruths.
Yet, we need to recognize that these untruths, whether small or large, have more far-reaching consequences.
Those are the big untruths, but there were small ones too: "We have greatly increased apprenticeships," he claimed, when he knows this is not high-quality engineering or craft training for the young, but mostly short courses for adult supermarket checkout staff, rebranded "apprenticeships".
