I've been musing lately about ways in which we say things we don't mean without actually lying. This has arisen from my attempts to explain to my four year old that we're not telling lies every time we don't tell the literal truth. For example, we may be joking, pretending, punning, or being sarcastic. It then dawned on me that there's lots of times where we say the opposite from what we mean without being dishonest. But how do you explain that to a four year old, particularly when you've spent all this time trying to explain that "lying" (or not telling the truth) is wrong?
How Many Ways Can I Say the Opposite?
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This must go along with having kids that age. I recently had exactly this discussion with my 5-year-old: why irony is funny but lying is not. It is an exceedingly difficult thing to explain.