3 ms·

So what? There are also non benevolent lies and polite truth.

• caf 8y ago
  We just call those "lies" and "truth", and that shows us nothing because it was never in doubt that truth and politeness are often not in conflict. On the other hand the idioms identified point to a long-standing understanding that sometimes, they are in conflict; a corollary of which is that one who always chooses complete honesty has likely failed to be polite from time to time, and one who is unfailingly polite has, like the curate describing his egg, likely given less than the total truth. Most of us tend towards the politeness side of the tradeoff - we might, for example, describe a potential process failure when a more honest appraisal is that carelessness was the root cause.