[Ads-l] "I'm/we're not going to lie"

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Wed Dec 13 21:57:36 UTC 2017


Has anyone else noticed an increasing use of the above phrase in both white
speech and writing, as in:

"We're not going to lie. The outcome of yesterday's election was an
unexpectedly-pleasant surprise."

I regard this as a somehow-annoying - I ain' gon' lie - standard calque on
the empty, for all practical purposes, BE catch-phrase,

_I ain' gon' lie_

roughly equivalent to - I ain' gon' lie - "no kidding," to the extent that
it's any more than a verbal tic like "Gnome sane?"

I ain' gon' lie. Gnome sane?



-- 
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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



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