Column Chronicles: Identifying liars - Frank Cotolo on 148.ca

Identifying liars

Frank Cotolo
September 16, 2021

Everyone gets a feeling now and again that someone is not telling the truth. How, though, do you really know if the feeling is correct? Why do you not believe someone is a liar?

Recent research into the subject reveals there are a few ways to tell if someone is a liar. The following tips are the most trusted clues to spotting a liar.

If a person tells you something and turns his or her head away or continues to talk and turns his or her body away before finishing speaking, that person is a liar. This includes broad movements, such as doing a pirouette before the end of a sentence.

A liar will often put an object between you and him or her while talking. Usually, the bigger the object placed between you and the liar, the bigger the lie. A dead giveaway is when a liar parks a Mack Truck in front of you while talking (or shouting because a Mack Truck is loud).

Liars avoid eye contact. This is more difficult to spot if the liar is wearing an eye patch or a Harley Quinn mask.

Here's a strange clue. If a liar uses a contraction instead of all separate words, what he or she is saying is a lie. There is no exception if the liar is having a baby. Women getting painful contractions, especially first time moms, are apt to say many cruel things to anyone about anything as birth approaches.

Watch for hand gestures, often they identify lies. These could be subtle movements, like touching throats or mouths (if a person is touching your throat, a more dire conflict is in the works). Obvious movements of the hands that are dead giveaways include making shadow puppets or using sign language while talking at the same time.

A liar may not answer a question truthfully by saying something out of context. Like if a wife asks her husband if he purposely parked the family car in some remote spot and burned it for the insurance and the husband bows his head, smiles and says, "I love you."

A liar often overcompensates when explaining something. A good example is when a liar is asked by his wife if he let the family dog run away and the liar says, "Swifty saw the door open and ran out. I tried to catch him but it happened so quickly. He ran through the bushes and jumped a fence before zipping through the neighbour's finely manicured lawn which they paid a ton of money for to Elegant Lawn Services, which cut and trimmed and even planted flowers, like those beautiful tulips you love, the same types of tulips that I bought for you when Uncle Sisyphus died and you brought them to his funeral even though I wanted you to keep them in the hall by the antique phone which I actually got to work but no one wanted to use it because they couldn't carry it around like their smartphones and little Johnny thought is was a toy tank, remember when he disconnected it and rolled it around the floor attacking his green toy soldiers that he had thousands of standing up and down the hall and he mowed them all down with the phone-tank..."

Frank Cotolo can be found hosting the talk and interview programme Cotolo Chronicles. You can send him an e-mail at this address: frank@148.ca.