870. We look at the linguistic difference between lying and misleading, and then because people often lie with numbers, we look at the difference between "percent" and "percentage" and how to use them.
870. We look at the linguistic difference between lying and misleading, and then because people often lie with numbers, we look at the difference between "percent" and "percentage" and how to use them.
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Grammar Girl here. I’m Mignon Fogarty, and you can think of me as your friendly guide to the English language. We talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.
Today, we’ll talk about the difference between lying and misleading people, and then because people can use numbers to lie and mislead, we'll talk about percent and percentages.
Are We Truthful or Just ‘Truthfully Misleading’?
by Valerie Fridland
Linguistic research looks at how we communicate false information
Philosophers as far back as Greek and Roman antiquity debated the meaning of truth. While what constitutes truth has always been controversial, these days it seems like the line between what’s true and what’s not has become increasingly hard to tease out. So let's look at what it means to lie versus mislead and how it plays out linguistically.
Lying versus misleading
Though it might seem subtle, there is a crucial difference in the act of lying versus the act of misleading:
Lying involves stating something that you know to be false, and a lie is still a lie regardless of whether your target buys it.
Misleading someone, on the other hand, can often be accomplished without explicitly saying something false and is more about nudging someone in the direction of what you want them to think.
Unlike lying, if your target doesn't buy your misleading statement, then you haven't misled anyone. In other words, both lying and misleading are forms of deceptive behavior, but how they are accomplished linguistically — and what’s at stake — are quite different.
For instance, think about a situation where Squiggly and Aardvark are talking about how much they each want a chocolate bar, and they generally keep chocolate bars in the pantry. If Squiggly tells Aardvark there are no more chocolate bars in the pantry despite knowing full well there's one left, Squiggly asserts something that is patently false — in other words, Squiggly is lying so he can grab the chocolate bar for himself later.
In contrast, Squiggly is only misleading Aardvark if he says something that is not itself false — for example, instead he might emphasize that there are cookies left to lead Aardvark to the conclusion, indirectly, that there are no chocolate bars left, only cookies.
Why is this difference important? Because lies come with greater costs to your reputation, while everyone from sneaky children to crafty politicians can maintain plausible deniability when "truthfully" misleading others. In short, being just misleading gives someone a weasely out that lying doesn’t.
How can something be deceptively truthful?
The trick is in the linguistics of how something is phrased. Because lies require speakers to explicitly say something they know is false, it is hard to deny if caught in that lie. So, if Squiggly says he did not eat the chocolate bar, but Aardvark saw him eating the chocolate bar, then he is pretty much busted. The consequence being that his standing as a trustworthy and reliable speaker will be knocked down a peg or two, not to mention that Aardvark will start hiding his Kit Kats when Squiggly is around.
However, what if Aardvark knew there was one Kit Kat left, and then later notices it is gone? He mentions this fact to Squiggly, who admits something that is in fact true — he shrugs and admits to having eaten one piece of the Kit Kat but says nothing about the rest of the Kit Kat. This triggers what those studying pragmatics call a "scalar implicature" where a listener infers through experience that a speaker’s use of the smaller term (e.g., one or a part) usually negates the larger term (e.g., all). A typical listener would think that if Squiggly says he ate one piece, that means he didn't also eat the rest.
In other words, we generally believe speakers are being as informative as possible. But this is not actually part of the semantic content of what Squiggly said because the literal meaning of Squiggly’s statement does not include any information about the rest of the Kit Kat.
As a result, since it is true that Squiggly did in fact eat one piece of the Kit Kat, he can deny having lied when later video surveillance shows him scarfing the entire thing. After all, he never said he didn’t eat all the Kit Kat. So, he was perhaps misleading Aardvark but not lying to him. The benefit in this distinction is that he can save face (and still get to eat the Kit Kat). This is the essence of plausible deniability and why it is so appealing to those who want to persuade others by manipulating the representation of facts.
Vague is in vogue
Squiggly can say it wasn't a lie that he claimed to have eaten a piece of the Kit Kat, when in fact the whole bar was consumed, because he was less informative (one chocolate stick) rather than fully informative (all four sticks) in describing what he did. This is a form of vagueness, and deception often relies on intentionally making vague statements that allow for a greater number of possible interpretations, even though the speaker suspects, based on experience and what’s contextually or culturally relevant, that certain incorrect but favorable interpretations are likely.
A great example of this comes from the way politicians running for office will often make statements that are hard to pin down in terms of what exactly they are promising. For example, saying you plan to make tax changes that benefit Americans is technically true if just two Americans benefit. By not being clear about how many benefit or precisely who benefits, politicians can more easily massage the facts later to fit what they said and deny that any campaign promises were broken. In short, by reducing the informativeness of what you say, you create the opportunity to mislead people without actually lying.
It’s all in what I mean, not what I say
The linguistic crux here is that the information we get when talking to others goes far beyond the pure semantic content (the literal meaning) of someone’s sentences. Conversationalists have expectations and cultural knowledge they apply to what the other person is saying, which leads them to interpret what is said in particular (and predictable) ways — something linguists call implicatures.
Speakers who want to be deceptive but want to maintain the appearance of being truthful, can instead be "truthfully" misleading by claiming they didn’t intend to lead to a particular inference by what they said.
And finally, of course, people can also lie and mislead at the same time.
The motto of this story is that it is up to the listener to beware — and to recognize such manipulation by understanding how misleading language can still be deceptive even if it's technically truthful. Pay attention to both what is said, and what isn't said.
That segment was written by Valerie Fridland, who is a professor of linguistics at the University of Nevada in Reno and the author of a forthcoming book on all the speech habits we love to hate. She is also a language expert for "Psychology Today" where she writes a monthly blog, Language in the Wild. You can find her at valeriefridland.com or on Twitter at @FridlandValerie.
And I have to say that right after Valerie turned in this piece, a company 100%, absolutely misled me, and because of this piece, I got really excited before I got angry. "I've been misled!!!" And then "Grr, jerks!"
'Percent'Versus 'Percentage'
by Mignon Fogarty
First let's get our terminology right. In some cases "percent" and "percentage"can be interchangeable, but the easiest way to choose the right word for the right situation is to use "percent"with a number and "percentage" without a number. For example,
"Percentage" without a number: What percentage of the chocolate was missing?
"Percent"with a number: Forty percent of the chocolate was missing
'Percent' Versus 'Per Cent'
In American English, when you write out the word "percent," it's one word. It's more common to see the two-word version—"per cent"—in British English. The one-word version is definitely gaining ground in Britain, but the two-word form is still more common.
The evolution of the word is kind of interesting. It started out as the two-word Latin phrase "per centum," which means "by the hundred," and over the years got shortened to the two-word English version with a period after "cent" to show that it was an abbreviation of "centum," then appeared as two words without a period, and is now quite established as a single English word.
Singular or Plural?
Sometimes people ask whether percentages are singular or plural, and as is so often the case, the answer is "It depends." If you're referring to a percentage of something, then that something determines whether youuse a singular or plural verb. (In technical terms, that "something" is called the object of the preposition. The preposition is the word "of.") Here are two examples:
"Forty percent of the chocolate is missing." (In that sentence, "the chocolate" is singular so you use a singular verb: "is.")
"Forty percent of the chocolate chips are missing." (In that sentence, "the chocolate chips"is plural so you use a plural verb: "are.")
But what if there's no preposition or object of the preposition after the word "percent"? You've lost your clue! First, ask yourself if it's implied. If the implied phrase is singular use a singular verb, and if it's plural use a plural verb. Here's an example where the plural is implied:
The chocolate chips were pillaged. Forty percent were missing. (In the second sentence, the plural phrase—"the chocolate chips"—is the implied object of the preposition, so you use the plural verb—"were.")
In the next example, the implied object is singular so you use a singular verb:
The chocolate was pillaged. Forty percent was missing.
Finally, if you have no way to figure out whether the word "percent"is referring to something singular or plural, you can use whatever verb you like--singular or plural--it's that easy.
Using the Word 'Percentage'
It's a little more complicated with the word "percentage." The same rules I just told you apply when you are talking about a percentage of something: singular something, singular verb; plural something, plural verb.
But when you are talking about the percentage of something, it's always singular.
A percentage of the chocolate chips were missing.
The percentage of chocolate chips missing was shocking.
Also, for "percentage," the order of the sentence matters. If the"percentage"phrase comes later in the sentence, after the verb, you need a singular verb.
A percentage of the chocolate chips were missing.
There is a large percentage of chocolate chips missing.
Words or Symbols?
Now that you know how to use percents, let's talk about how to write percents in a sentence. Style guides disagree about when you should use the word "percent" or the symbol and when you should use the numeral or the word for the number.
In general, I like the style where you always use the numeral and the percent symbol. The Associated Press Stylebook makes that recommendation (which is a recent change), and the Chicago Manual of Style says it's allowed, but that writing out the word "percent" is more common in nontechnical contexts.
The MLA Handbook has an even different rule: It says to spell it all out if you can do so in three words or less, but to use the numeral and percent symbol if it would take more words. So in MLA style, you'd write out "one hundred percent" with all the words, but you'd use numerals and the percent symbol for "48.5%."
As you can tell, the styles are all over the place, so be sure to check your style guide if you are required to follow one, and if not, decide on a style you like for yourself and just be consistent.
All three styles do agree, though, that you should write out the words if you use the percent at the beginning of a sentence.
Decimals
Next, let's talk about small numbers.
If you're talking about a percent that is less than one, make sure you put a zero before the decimal point. Write something like 0.2%, not just .2%. This is true for writing any numeral that is less than one whether it's a percent or not. That little decimal point is too easy to miss without the zero in front of it.
Lies, D*** Lies, and Percentages
Finally, there are a few things you should know about calculating and interpreting percentages.
First, something can't decrease by more than 100%. Once 100% of something is gone, there isn't anything left, so don't write that a price or anything else decreased by 150%, for example.
Second, there's a difference between a percent change and a percentage point change. Going from 5% of something to 10% of something is a 100% increase, but only a 5 percentage point increase. Be careful not to call that a 5% increase because that's a common error.
And third, when you are reading about medical, political, or financial news, it is important to understand that big percentage changes can mean small overall increases or decreases. For example, an article that reports a 50% increase in the rate of a rare disease may be telling you that instead of 1 in 100,000 people getting floogety flork disease every year, now 1.5 people in 100,000 get the disease every year. A 50% increase sounds a lot scarier than the increase in raw numbers. Percentages aren't always misleading, but they can be, so your "could this be misleading" detector should be amped up when you start reading or hearing about percentages.
Finally, I have a familect story from Chuck. one of my old podcasting friends!
Chuck is one of my old podcasting friends. He's one of the authors of "Podcasting for Dummies," and the co-host of the Technorama podcast. I especially love to hear familect stories from old friends, so thanks for the message, Chuck.
If you want to call with the story of your familect, a word your family and only your family uses, you can leave a voicemail at 83-321-4-GIRL. Call from a nice, quiet place, and I might play it on the show.
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I’m Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl.
That’s all. Thanks for listening.