Definition
: given to or characterized by deception or falsehood or divergence from absolute truth
Mendacious and lying have very similar meanings, but the two are not interchangeable. Mendacious is more formal and literary, suggesting a deception harmless enough to be considered somewhat bland. Lying is more blunt, accusatory, and often confrontational. You might yell, "You lying rat!" in an argument, but you would most likely stick to the more diplomatic, "Aren't you being somewhat mendacious?" in a business meeting. Mendacious can also imply habitual untruthfulness, whereas lying is more likely to be used to identify specific instances of dishonesty.
"So, do you believe in aliens?" My class mate whispered to me.
The teacher was absent and a was in place. The substitute, having received no helpful notes as to what the previous teacher had actually been teaching us, had settled on the age old ploy of putting on an educational video. It was so old that it was an actual VHS tape about manufacturing screws and other metallic objects and was about as interesting as that sounded. (To be fair, our usual teacher had not really been much of an educator these past few months if truth be told - they been embroiled in a rather daring love triangle with the sports teacher and the sixth form maths teacher. Unbeknownst to the adults, the entire student body was aware of it and were currently taking bets on the outcome. Also unbeknownst to the individuals involved, they were also taking great care to conceal the badly disguised affaire from the governors of the school and anyone else who could discover and disrupt the romance (probably by firing said individuals for moral misconduct or some other deadly boring and adult reason) and thus ruining the student's entertainment and the various bets currently in play. The absence of our teacher had the rumour mills running wild and the bookies either pulling their hair out or running new bets on a possibly pregnancy, elopement with a fourth party or possibly the intervention of the authorities. Even as we were speaking, the best social media experts in class were sneaking glances at the phones, trying to figure out what had gone on from a variety of social pages. Most of us were confident that they'd have it figured out by the end of class. Adults, especially the ones that didn't grow up with social media, truly had no understanding of how frightening it could be.)
Since the video was a great let down from our usual classes (although marginally more educational if you were referring to standardized testing. Although arguably our usual teacher's chaotic and unconventional love life could be seen to be a lot more educational when it came to real life and the consequences of one's own actions.) many of the class were quietly gossiping amongst themselves or sneakily looking at their phones. The substitute teacher at the head of the class was blatantly looking at theirs and it was clearly apparent that as long as we left them be, they would leave us be.
"So, do you?" My class mate hissed at me again.
"Well, you know, more things in heaven and earth and all that jazz." I said weakly. "Who knows what's out there?"
I, in fact, knew for certain that there was life on other planets. This was because my dippy, air headed, does insane things when under the influences of alcohol, hippy of a sister had met some. Apparently, at a house party she had gone to and got completely wasted at, she had had a long and rambling conversation with some house plants who claimed to be aliens. Said aliens had asked her to carry them out to the field out back, so they could be picked up by some friends who were dropping by later who could give them a life home. She had willingly complied with this, emptying her host's bathroom of plants and sneaking them out back where they were picked up by 'a big glowy light.'
I would have completely written this off as just another one of my sister's idiotic drunken tales where she'd had too much to drink and just imagined some random shit (like the time she helped a frankenstein girl find her finger after she dropped in the bathroom at a club or the time she caught a werewolf pissing in the park) were it not for two things.
The first one was that the plants from the bathroom had completely vanished, not a trace of them to be found (a friend of a friend was the younger sister of the girl who threw the party and she had told my friend with great relish how her older sister had been completely bollocked by their mother - not just cause of the plants (although that was on the list) but also because of a great quantity of missing alcoholic beverages from her mother's private stash, a broken faucet in the kitchen, ashy black footprints on the ceiling of the living room and mysterious stains in her bed. Her sister was now grounded until she was about 80 years old).
Even so, I still believed that my sister could have (drunkenly) taken the plants and then (drunkenly) just ditched them somewhere. This was, admittedly, unlike her as although in some aspects her moral code was somewhat...grey, she had never been one for thievery, the entire idea of it made her uncomfortable. But still, it was the likeliest scenario.
However, the second thing made it impossible not to believe my sister.
My sister, although an airhead in terms of personality, was a good student and had received excellent grades. However, as she had burned herself out earning them (her words) she had decided to take a gap year and go travelling. Apparently she must have mentioned that to her plant aliens, because three weeks after the party, an alien spaceship landed in our back garden and the alien pilots asked her if she'd like to come along see the galaxy and beyond for her gap year.
Managing to gain my parents approval (whilst they were still shell shocked from the appearance of small, green, leafy aliens in amongst their rosebushes and rhododendrons - although they at least had the wherewithal to make her promise to contact us regularly and to definitely be back in time for the first term of university) my older sister had dashed upstairs, grabbed her back pack and some clothes, squeezed herself in to the dinky little spaceship and had headed off to stars unknown.
And there she still was, darting about the stars, meeting creatures that humanity didn't even know existed, seeing worlds and places completely different to our own, occasionally getting stomach upsets when she ate something that was completely incompatible with her internal digestive system. As promised, she regularly sent us updates and photos of how she was doing (the plant aliens were surprisingly adept with technology and had somehow integrated her phone system with their own communication software - which lead to a lot of selfies with random aliens with the tag lines of 'so cute!', "so polite!", "smells so good!!!").
My sister was basically having the gap year to end all gap years - and had anyone from NASA or similar agencies found out, they would have been green with envy. they had spent all their life studying and training to one day, maybe, go into space and perhaps find some alien moss on Mars or something, and there was my sister - who was just completely wasted at the right place, at the right time.
Yeah, they'd probably hate her. I mean, I didn't hate her - she was my sister after all, but sometimes, sometimes I really envied her. Especially like, for example, right now when my phone buzzed in my hand and I looked down to see a photo she'd sent. She was somewhere in deep space, still n the space ship, and she'd taken the picture of the view outside the window. It was some sparkling galaxy, far away. It looked like the aurora borealis (something I'd always wanted to see) only make of diamonds and glitter.
"Pretty!!" She'd put. Understatement of the century. Although, now she'd seen so much, perhaps she was just used to views of such grandeur and now to her, they were only 'pretty'.
My fingers clenched on my phone. My class mate had already lost interest in me and was currently pestering the person on the other side. Not that I could ever show anyone this. They'd think I'd made it up with photoshop and was some sort of habitual liar or worse - mad and thus condemned to some sort of mental asylum.
The credits were starting to roll on the video and static was chasing itself across the screen. The substitute teacher stretched and began to pack up. I sighed. Only another six, probably incredibly mundane, classes to go.
Boring, boring, boring. School sometimes just felt too small, too grey. I knew a lot of teenagers felt this way, but when your sister was out and about swanning across the galaxy in an alien spaceship having the time of her life, how could a normal school life compare?
My phone buzzed again in my hand. i glanced down to see another text from my sister.
"Hey sis! You've got your summer holidays coming up soon yeah? Fancy travelling about with me for a bit? The planties say you're welcome to come. It'll be a bit of a squish in the ship (it's a dinky one!) but we should have loads of fun! What do you say?"
I started to grin.
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