Words Which Deceive
花言巧语
One day a man asked his son Ned to cut the grass. The boy did not want to do the work. So, after his father had gone away, he pushed the mower angrily. It ran down the slope, and crashed against a wall. Ned tried to push it, but it would not work.
“I did not break the mower, ” said the boy to himself, “it broke itself.” He tried to deceive himself with words, but he knew in his heart that they were lies and so he was afraid to meet his father. After school, he walked slowly through the park alone because he did not want to go home.
At the end of that day, Ned went home. He was relieved to find that his father was not there. Ned's mother said to him, “It is six o'clock, and your school closes at four. Where have you been, my boy?”
“O, Mother,” said the boy, “when I play ball with my friends, I forget about everything else. I do not think of the time or about coming home. Is dinner ready?”
The boy's mother was deceived. Ned's answer led her to think that he had been playing ball with his friends. But he had not been playing at all.
He had been avoiding his father because of the broken mower. He did not want to tell his mother that. He wanted her to think that he had been playing.
“It is bad that you have lied to your mother,” said something in Ned's heart, as he sat down to his dinner. “I don't care,” said the boy to himself. “I did not tell a lie. I did not say that I was playing.”
“But,” said the voice, “you used words which make your mother think that you had been playing, and that was the same as if you had said so. Also, you haven't told her about the broken mower.”
“I did not tell a lie,” said Ned.
What do you think, reader? Did Ned tell a lie, or didn't he?
If we use words which are intended to deceive, we tell a lie. Ned's lie was an especially bad one because it looked so like the truth. A lie that looks like the truth is the worst kind of lie.