Liar? Hmmm. Pathological? Almost certainly
You don't have to be a liar to tell falsehoods - you might just be very odd and unable to tell the difference between truth and fiction. Also, to lie implies an expectation of and hope for belief. So, preamble over, and inspired by some of the stories here, I present the story of A, who (surely) can neither have hoped for nor expected belief.

A was in my year at school and was undoubtedly the singularly most peculiar person I, or anyone else in the school, had ever met. He smelled terrible, never ate anything (he would spend lunchtime trying to give you his sausages...), was terrified of anyone female (not a problem in my school until the VI form, as it happened - we were single-sex for most subjects up until then), was terrified of nudity (he used to wear his games kit under his uniform, and put his uniform back on top after the lesson, for example; on the rare occasions he would deign to participate in swimming training - he couldn't swim, BTW - he would not remove his trunks afterwards)... I could go on. But this is a QotW about lying, and I wasn't a B3tan when the "wierd kid" question was open.

Where was I? Oh, yes. A's falsehoods. Two astonishing examples spring to mind, to wit:
1) He was, he claimed, white. The fact that he was clearly Indian, had an Indian name, and carried a photograph of himself looking glum with his extended Indian family in India made no difference to this. In fact, he would regularly make deeply racist remarks about non-whites just to demonstrate how white he was.
2) He had no penis. Most guys might lie about their penis, in the belief that bigger means better; castration is used as a taunt. But A was adamant that he didn't have one at all because he had been castrated. (It would explain his high voice, come to think of it...)

(He was consistent in his falsehood - he kept both these going from the time he came to the school in autumn 1990 until after we finished our A-Levels in 1995. Bizarre.)

His propensity to fabricate was matched only by his credulity. He had endless faith in the ability of John Major to win every election between then (the early-to-mid 1990s) and the end of his natural life; and when my friend B told A that most normal people had horns and a tail, which had to be filed down and hidden respectively, A believed him. He was studying A-level biology at the time. Mind you, the late Mrs F, the teacher of that class, corroborated B's story and expressed concern to A that he lacked these appendages.

I frequently google A to see what he's up to now... but he seems to have vanished off the face of the planet.
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Sat 1 Dec 2007, 14:21, Reply)