Hi folks, I'm new here. I think that our language would benefit from a word describing a situation of forcing one to lie. Frequently in life, an otherwise honest person is pressured into being untruthful for one's (perceived) safety or well-being, something like: don't ask / don't tell. What might be an adjective to describe this kind of entrapment?

Lying is medacity, so could this be mendaxogenic?

Dysfunctional parenting has sometimes been called psychogenic or (falsely) schizophrenogenic, meaning to give rise to another's becoming psychotic. How about a little less severe, and only to another's lying? A kind of meta-gaslighting?

Is there a word for mendaxogenics, mendaxophilia or mendaxophobia (fear of lying)?

Confabulation is a psychiatric term for compulsive telling of stories.
Confabulogenics?

Awaiting your reply, in truth,
Richard

Hi Richard. My Mom called it peer pressure but that's two words.

Hi Richard. My Mom called it peer pressure but that's two words.

and that's two posts!

/hug zed :¬ )


welcome, Richard!

And peer pressure can do a lot of things besides making people lie.

A related term for an habitual liar is mythomaniac.

One writer on the Internet speculates:

"Kleptomania is taken from the Greek, meaning a mania for stealing - if there were an equivalent word for compulsive lying it would logically be Pseftomania (Psefto=to lie). But this word does not actually seem to exist. It seems the technical term is either compulsive or pathological liar."

The sense I am trying to convey is that of a home where a child grows up being forced to not tell the truth, for any number of reasons — fear of punishment, covering up for a parent, etc. In the pseftogenic home, the pressure to lie is more likely coming from mom, rather than internally or from peers (sorry Zed).

It may not need to be a single word. An approximate antonym, one that I personally like, is truth-seeking. This suggests a phrase something like truth-denying (abusing or shattering?) or maybe just slippery? Undermining is also close.

Richard

Richard, I looked up awkward in a thesaurus, and these seem to fit best: dangerous, disagreeable, discommodious, hazardous, incommodious, inconvenient, perilous, risky, troublesome, uncomfortable, unhandy, unmanageable.

My best recommendation is to pair one of these with a word such as "situation" or "lifestyle", etc. I could be wrong, but I don't think there is a word that indicates being forced to lie--without some specification for why, that is. Other than that, all I can think of is some statement along the lines of, "Joe grew up knowing that telling the truth was dangerous".

Edit--I do realize this is not what you're asking for: sorry. Maybe one of the real word whizzes will offer something good.

Mendaceous blackmail/force/influence/constraint/extortion?

Perjurous pressure?

I suggest the term "vericidal" (having the tendency of killing the truth). It even yields some Google hits, although I suspect this is due to misspellings..

I don't know what word you could use for being forced to lie, but I frequently use one for what you have to do when you're in that difficult situation. I call it "pre-truthing". Say, for example, someone invites you to come and look at their 5,000 vacation pictures on Friday night. You know you have no obligations, but you quickly say "I'm going out with a friend that night, sorry". Then you phone all of your friends until you find one that will go out with you, thereby making your statement retroactively true.

Welcome nosnjoh, I love the concept of "retroactively true."



(How do you pronounce nosnjoh?)

I thought it was 'johnson', jumbled and ineffable.
-ron o.

Yes but would you pronounce it johnson??

no. it's in-eff-able!

[snort]

So there's no Fs in it. So big deal. We can't all have Fs in our names. There's only so many to go around, ya know. Doesn't mean you can't pronounce it.

Nossenjoe.

There, see how easy? I wouldn't have that first E in there, but then, that's just me.

Nossenjoe. Nuttin', Joe. Muttonjoe. Muttonhead. (Good grief, I think Branshea's rubbing off on me...) ;-)

Hmmm, well however they pronounce it I'll bet we've scared them off now.