heyhoneyfox:

“I’m lying to you but this sentence is technically the truth without context” is such a good trope. Like yes the way that I am spinning these words forms a lies but if you squint I’m actually not lying.

Odo DS9 does this all the time

love his autistic rules-lawyering aversion to outright lies, how he keeps to literal truths even when trying to deceive. it’s so funny for a guy whose biological nature is deceptive mimicry, but it fits him so well

the counterpoint to Garak. “It was all lies. Especially the truths”

…also, I initially read OP’s first sentence as a riff on the liar’s paradox (“this sentence is a lie,” and the trope where a computer crashes trying to make sense of it because it breaks logic with how it can’t be either true or false)

and then my brain damn near crashed trying to figure out if the riff was also a paradox, until thoughts about Odo came along to distract me