Member-only story

Call Them What They Are: Lies

Karen Shiebler
2 min readOct 15, 2024

--

Time to stop playing games with the English language

Tony Bowden from Tallinn, Estonia, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

I hate it when people misuse the English language. I hate it when they replace perfectly good English words with newer ones.

I hate the word “signage”, for example. It’s a sign. It isn’t signage.

The English language has evolved over millennia. It has excellent, specific vocabulary to express nearly every idea a human could ever have.

That is why I used clear and concise language to interact with my students when I was a fifth-grade teacher.

If a child entered the classroom and informed me that his dog had eaten his homework, I did not ask him if he was “sharing false or misleading information.” I asked if he was sure he was telling the truth, and not lying.

When I caught my own teenage kids going to a party in the woods instead of a study session at the library, I didn’t get mad that they were “spreading disinformation.” I got mad because they lied to me.

So you can imagine how disgusted I am every time I hear a newscaster accusing Donald Trump and JD Vance of “sharing disinformation” instead of stating the simple truth: They are lying.

Trump is not being “misleading” when he says he won the 2020 election by a landslide. He’s lying through his teeth. It isn’t a…

--

--

Karen Shiebler
Karen Shiebler

Written by Karen Shiebler

A Mother, a grandmother, a progressive voter. I write because it’s getting harder to march and because words are my weapon. I blog at momshieb.wordpress.com

Responses (1)