mendacious (adj)
False, dishonest, lying, or untruthful.
"And then she would say quite simply, without taking (as she would once have taken) the precaution of covering herself, just in case, with a little fragment borrowed from the truth, that she had at that very moment arrived by the morning train. These words were mendacious; at least for Odette they were mendacious, insubstantial, lacking (what they would have if true) a basis of support in her memory of her actual arrival at the station; she was even prevented from forming a mental picture of whatever quite different thing she had been doing at the moment she pretended to have been alighting from the train."
--Marcel Proust, Remembrance of Things Past: Swann's Way, Within a Budding Grove
I ride the PATH train back and forth every day, but never think of myself as "alighting" from it -- more like charging out of it with the rest of the herd. My life is not very "Proustian" I guess, though I have a pretty good memory of "things past", including the time I tried to actually read Marcel's book. I thought his long and winding sentences were elegant, but I found the endless accumulation of thousands of them to be...what's the word...soporific. (Note to self: use "soporific" in conversation tomorrow. Resist temptation to be mendacious and say "grinchy" if someone asks what you mean.)
(Mendacious, by the way, is one of the words that the late David Foster Wallace circled in his dictionary.)
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Proust: a strange egg. He liked to be whipped and humiliated. He was very rich from an inheritance. He would sleep all day and write all night while lying in bed. His bedroom was cork-lined for silence.
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