“Sorry, I lied”
“Hey, what time is the party on Friday?”
“4:00.”
“What? I thought that it was later on in the night.”
“Oh, right. 6:00. Sorry, I lied.”
I have heard this (or countless iterations) many times, and it bugs me. They didn’t lie.
There’s a fundamental necessity for a lie, and that is deception. Lying has nothing to do with the factuality of the thing being lied about. If an employee cleans something, forgets that they did it, lies to a superior about it (oh yeah, I did that), they still lied.
Lying is nothing about factual data and all about the intention of the heart. So the person who gave the incorrect time in the first example is doing simply that, and nothing more. Their intention was to properly inform, but failed to provide accurate information.
This might sound like mere semantics, but I think this is far beyond that. When we say we lie when we’re not, we’re watering down the real meaning of the word, and likely degrading ourselves in our own mind, even if it’s not a conscious thing.
So, don’t beat yourself up so much. We are prone to lying enough as it is that we don’t need to add fake ones to the mix.