Ask me no questions,
I’ll tell you no lies.
Cottleston, cottleston, cottleston pie.
-A.A.Milne
Isn’t it interesting that English has so many ways to describe different ways of saying things that aren’t true. There’s the plain old “lie,” of course, but there are a number of alternatives, each with its own subtleties and connotations. You can distort, evade, garble, exaggerate, and hedge, all of which involve avoiding the truth without coming right out with a blatant falsehood. And then there’s “prevaricate,” which on the one hand might be the most subtle of all of them, and on the other hand is defined in dictionaries by using practically all the other terms together.
The Oxford English Dictionary says that “prevaricate” means “to deviate from straightforwardness; to speak or act in an evasive way; to quibble, equivocate,” and the American Heritage Dictionary manages to additionally use “equivocate,” “shuffle,” and “palter” in its definition.
“Prevaricate” comes from the Latin word “praevaricare,” which had to do with farming, not speech. “Praevaricare” meant to make the furrows in your field crooked when you were plowing. It acquired a metaphorical meaning too, and meant to stray from the correct life path by breaking the law. When “prevaricate” entered English (around the 1400s or so), that metaphorical meaning was the one it brought with it. It wasn’t until the early 1600s that “prevaricate” began to mean “speaking in a dishonestly evasive manner.” It’s not exactly lying, exactly — it’s more like if someone asked if you had eaten the last chocolate-chip cookie, and you had. Just saying “no I didn’t” would be lying. Saying something like “I was afraid there was something wrong with those cookies and I wanted to make sure you didn’t get sick from them. So yes, the cookies ARE gone…but you’re perfectly safe now.” That would be more like “prevaricating.”
“Palter,” which is used far less frequently than “prevaricate,” is in the same general realm of “words that mean you’re avoiding the truth somehow.” “Palter” appeared in the early 1500s and originally meant “to speak indistinctly” — mumbling or slurring, more or less. Nobody knows where it came from; it sounds like it might be based on the verb “palt,” except that there’s never been such a verb. It also sounds like it might be related to either “paltry” (insignificant) or “falter” but with the “f” changed to “p” to make it closer to “palsy,” which could be the cause of slurred speech. But all that is just speculation; nobody really knows.
Another way to avoid a simple, clear, truthful statement is to “tergiversate,” a word that should probably be used more often. “Tergiversate” has been used — to the extent that it’s been used at all — since the mid 1600s, when it was adapted from the Latin “tergiversatus,” turning one’s back on something. In the English version, what you’re turning your back on is either what you said before, on your past loyalty to someone or something, or on that idea of clear, truthful statements. “Tergiversate” is virtually obsolete nowadays — the word, that is. The practice, of course, is alive and well.
P.S. You can find a recipe for Cottleston Pie here: https://www.amazon.com/Winnie-Pooh-Cookbook-Virginia-Ellison/dp/0525423591/
