Grammar girl here I'm in y'on foggarty your friendly guide to the

English language. We talk about writing history rules and other cool stuff. Today we're gonna talk about writing, history, rules, and other cool stuff.

Today we're going to talk about whether you can tell people are lying by the language they use

and about the difference between being legendary or merely famous.

Despite our tendency to view public figures with skepticism,

some newsmakers continue to surprise us with the breadth and depth of their

lies.

Equally disturbing can be how long it takes to uncover the false tales, even when much of what the liars claim should be relatively

easy to check. But our tendency to believe what people say is tied to the underlying rules that guide us to be cooperative conversationalists, an important

part of civilized society. With most of us assuming that such cooperation includes telling the truth.

Unfortunately, this tendency makes us quite bad at sensing when someone's lying.

Research shows that humans perform only slightly better than chance,

a detecting deception, even with training.

And sometimes the news feels like a daily reminder of both our propensity to take people at their

word and our failure to detect signs that people are lying.

But the fact that we aren't able to recognize it when someone lies doesn't mean they don't leave

clues to their dishonesty. In that vein, researchers have been trying to determine whether liars or truth tellers have certain linguistic tells. Can

studying language use reveal when someone's being deceptive? Well, quite a bit of

psycholinguistic research has examined how a filled pauses, those

umms and us that pop into our speech happen when our brains are working extra hard as we're constructing sentences or searching for words.

And some psychological research suggests that they could also be indicators of how truthful

a speaker is being.

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