Topical Guide 512
Mark Dorset
Persuasion: Truth as a Technique of
Reservations Recommended, Chapter 5:
“Leila,” he says, dropping his voice and speaking with the flat tone we use to show, or pretend, that we have dropped all pretense, “if you were ten years older, I’d be falling in love with you.”
Leila gets it. She doesn’t say anything. She goes back to her soup.
“Maybe I am anyway,” Matthew says, speaking so softly that she just hears him, and then bending to his soup.
A fine job, Matthew, says BW. A very fine job indeed. I think you’ve really turned a corner here, and I couldn’t have done a better job myself.
I just told her the truth.
Yes, yes, you did. You used what is sometimes the best ploy of all: the honesty ploy.
It wasn’t a ploy. It was the truth.
It was a ploy, Matthew. You’re using the truth to win her. You’ve found your technique. You’ve got your line. It happens to be the truth, but it’s still a line.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, The Sweet Cheat Gone, “Grief and Oblivion”:
“You think I’ve made all this up?”
“Not at all,” Saint-Loup assured me out of consideration for myself, out of discretion, and also because he knew that truth is often stranger than fiction. After all, it was by no means impossible that in this tale of the thirty thousand francs there might be, as I had told him, a large element of truth. It was possible, but it was not true and this element of truth was in fact a lie.
See also:
Lying and Truth-Telling TG 154, TG 438
Marketing: Persuasion TG 415; Manipulation and Persuasion TG 138; Slogans and Sloganeering TG 444
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