>The person labelling something as a "lie" is usually doing so in order to outright dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth without actually having to prove it

>The person labelling something as a "lie" is usually doing so in order to outright dismiss some uncomfortably partial truth without actually having to prove it's wrong in its entirety I don't think the usually is well placed on that one. If I call something a lie, it rarely is about denial of the nuggets of truth in the big sentence - it's about the damn thing being a lie. You don't have to prove things are wrong in their entirety. Arguments/statements are like house of cards or long Mathematical transformations - if any subset of the thing is wrong, the whole thing is wrong. If you care about truth and correctness, you should stick to short sentences and properly using abstractions.