Lying is a verb: to be deceptive or to tell something that is not the truth. Makes sense, I mean, we all learned the definition of lying in kindergarten along with things like treat others the way you want to be treated and don’t eat glue. What about omitting the truth? Technically it’s not really an act, but rather the absence of one. More often than not, half-truthing is an excuse that we grow up believing is morally dandy, because after all, we are not lying. The very first loophole finders themselves hardly took half a minute to find this one.

First off, let me address the issue that “half-truth” is not the legitimate or official terminology, but that is what we’re going to go with for the time being. Simply because after looking it up on Google and Urban Dictionary, terms like “Obi-Wan truth” and “lawyer talk” came up. As adults we lie all the time, to protect feelings, to make things less awkward, despite the fact that we were reprimanded and shamed at a young age for lying. We lie to get ahead in life. We have learned to integrate it into our daily lives, morphing it into this idea of half-truths, doing what is equivalent to denying drawing on the wall in crayon. But because we are (supposedly) more intelligent now that we’re older, we have recognized the fact that when paired with an excuse or logical/emotional/awesome reason for doing so, we can get away with almost any act.

However, do not think that we are bad people for creating such a system. Hell, the world half-truths things all the time. Peanuts aren’t really nuts, a palm tree isn’t really a tree, and a penny is worth more than a penny.

Although seemingly random, I relate half-truths to the huge debate about marriage equality, specifically on Facebook. If you live under a rock, you would not notice the fact that Facebook is going red, plastered with the profile pictures of those who support gay marriage rights, and who want to express their support in a more public way. I do not mean to offend anyone, but from what I’ve seen from many of my friends on Facebook, both sides are only throwing half-truths at each other. Each bible passage can be contradicted by another, as well as each belief. So why even get into this evidently endless argument? Noah Michelson, Huffpost Gay Voices Editor was interviewed by the Huffington Post saying, “…it’s starting a discussion, and it’s making people actually have to confront what’s going on, on a microlevel rather than this huge macrolevel that’s maybe a little bit hard to relate to.”

Maybe that’s why we lie, why we half-truth our way along. What if over the centuries, civilization has worked its way from lying to half-truthing. Could it be that the key is small steps, that we need change over time? All that we semi-secretly need is to start the discussion. It used to be that we lied to get ahead in life, through deception. Now, we half-truth to get ahead in life, whether that means not hurting someone’s feelings, or starting a conversation. And hey, the glass-half-full kind of guy might even say that in the future, human kind might just start to tell the truth. But if he said that, he’d probably be lying.
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