Eskimos : snow :: English speakers : lying

[Joel S. Berson]

"[T]he English vocabulary contains 112 differently shaded words for
deception ...".

Robin Marantz Henig, "Looking for the Lie," New York Times, Feb. 5,
2006.  http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/05/magazine/05lying.html

"The late British psychiatrist and deception expert Sean Spence
observed that across cultures, there are more words for deception
than for honesty, perhaps because there are many ways to deceive but
only one way to tell the truth."

Sean A. Spence et al., "A Cognitive Neurobiological Account of
Deception: Evidence from Functioning Neuroimaging," Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society of London B 359 (2004): 1755--1762, 1756.

Quotations and citations from Sally Satel and Scott O. Lilienfeld,
"Brainwashed: The Seductive Appeal of Mindless Neuroscience" (New
York: Basic Books, 2013), p. 77.

Joel

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org