Lying teeth
I was wondering, what kind of lies you can tell your teeth.
Many things might pass between your brain and your teeth in the course of a day, although the teeth are normally the most quiescent among the different body parts available. The stomach, on the other hand, might be the most insistent communicator among those parts, being in a constant state of hunger (and if you're on a diet, lying to your stomach that 'nope, we're not hungry,' won't last you very long.)
I've tried lying to my teeth that in the case of a toothache, there wasn't any pain. No, no pain at all. But if the tooth is throbbing and preventing sleep, lying doesn't give much satisfaction. Maybe a painkiller will bring some form of relief and blessed sleep, but lying? No dice.
I ask because on the last day of 2017, even as New Year's Eve was imminent, I broke a tooth. I was hurriedly changing, and in haste, I tried to cut a piece of string with my teeth. Bam! Off a tooth flew, and shock immediately followed. I dropped to my knees frantically looking for the broken tooth, in the hopes I could epoxy the damn thing.
How I spent that night, hopefully greeting the New Year in, became pretty much pre-ordained. (Not a lot of smiling, and developing a new complex.)
So I had to frantically lie to my teeth, to tell them, not to worry. We were still in tip-top shape, all-around gorgeous, and that the missing tooth was not a harbinger of dreadful things to come.
So one can actually lie to one's teeth, contrary to the idiomatic controversy on the internet. As you may recall, embattled Rappler CEO Maria Ressa was accused by a blogger of lying to her teeth. The accusations were so serious, social media explosions shortly followed.
As ably pointed out by fellow grammarians, the correct idiomatic expression is "lie through her teeth." The debate isn't about whether the lies were made before (past tense, in which case it should be, "lied to her teeth") as opposed to a continuing lie (present tense, in which case, it should be "lie to her teeth" or maybe even "lying to her teeth".)
Instead, the debate should be about whether the lying is through the teeth (as in, the lies physically emit from between the space occupying the top and bottom rows of teeth) or some other conduit. Might she have lied through the internet, perhaps? Or via affidavits?
Maybe, instead of lying through the teeth, we could explore alternative forms of lying? What about "through the eyes," when we look at a politician without giving the hint that we want to stab them dead? Or perhaps, we can try "lying through the 'preferred body part'" when we sleep with someone abhorrent?
Twitter has become a great way for the President of the United States to lie. "Social media influencer" is another way for pretty liars to make money. And of course, how can we ignore the big lying story of 2017, the now ubiquitous "fake news"?
Such a sad world we have landed in, when (and where) the forms of lying have been scrutinized so thoroughly.
At least in my case, I was lying to my teeth. Not that it worked. Shortly thereafter, I was sitting at my dentist's chair, enduring hours of reconstructive work to create the perfect smile.
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