“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant-

Success in Circuit lies”

That’s the beginning of an Emily Dickinson poem, one that I’ve been thinking about lately. Truth sounds so simple, so black-and-white, but in my experience, that’s often not the case. Perspective, background, audience, purpose—all those and more impact what “the truth” is. That’s without even considering Truth, as opposed to truth.

What have I proven thus far? That I nitpick words and meaning too much, probably. That defining and clarifying is a fundamental paradigm for me. Not a news flash, at least for anyone who pays attention to my conversation and thought patterns. There are several aspect to “telling all the truth” I have been thinking about, but today, I’m focusing just on one: telling the truth slant.

That can mean a variety of things: leaving out pieces of info that some people might see as relevant; revealing info, but telling it in such a way as to show that it’s really not that crucial; making the relationship between pieces of info less explicit than it could be; quibbling about the meaning or definition of pieces of info–that’s only a smidgen of the ways the truth can be told slant–and that’s assuming the info is revealed, not allowing for the ever-popular and often successful “sin of omission,” just leaving out things that probably the other people would think are important.

There’s one other technique that I’m especially fond of: the slightly humorous truth-telling. It can focus on the ironic, on the self-deprecating, on the surprising-enough that it seems absurd, or even on the oddly worded–all those work in some context. For instance, someone asks what I spent the evening doing last night, expecting that I was watching tv or something equally appropriate and banal, but I answer, “Oh, the usual, surfing porn while chatting with a stranger from craigslist and drinking rum and coke,” well…there’s always chance that’s the truth. Maybe. Or maybe I was watching Buffy and texting MLA style hints to panicked students like you assumed I was doing. Because the assumption is that nice, lonely, middle-aged Sunday school teachers are, well…..nice…..the first option seems ludicrous. And it is, of course—but there are times I cop to the truth that way, knowing that no one believes me.