Lying. We all do it, and it’s done to us all.

We have a lot of words for it: Fibs. Shams. Whoppers. Yarns. Red herrings. Myths. Fairy tales. Propaganda. Trumped-up terminological inexactitude.

There are bald-based and bold-faced lies, white lies and blue lies. We bluff. We puff up and cover up. We deceive, defame, and disinform. We weasel and wax ironic. We fake, falsify, fabricate, prevaricate, confabulate, defraud and dissimulate. We speak with forked tongue in cheek. We con, twist, omit, and spin. We pile it on. We call it bull, B.S. and baloney and shovel it into crocks.

I know one such crock. It calls itself Country Crock. It isn’t a crock. It’s a plastic tub of congealed vegetable oil from the friendly farmers at Unilever. The fake crock bears a picture of a nonexistent barn on a fake and frilly placard faked with woodgrain. Above, it says, “Shedd’s Spread,” but Shedd does not exist. Below, a fake scroll says, “Country Fresh Taste.”

I live in the country. Its fresh tastes are many: pine sap, pond water, sassafras, honey, mint, wild garlic, trout, raspberries, with aromas of rain, skunk, manure, and mown hay. But fresh congealed vegetable oil? Never.

Advertisers lie to buyers. Robots call us up to lie. Spin doctors blur lies into a foggy notion of maybe.

And that’s not all.

We lie to ourselves. (“This isn’t happening.”)

We lie to simplify. (“Fine, whatever.”)

We lie in politeness. (“How interesting!”)

We lie in the name of love. (“Of course I love you!”)

We lie to kids to give them hope. (Everything’s going to be all right, and Santa Claus is coming to town!)

Men dress in pinstripes and lie about how much sex they’ve had. Women paste their lips with lies and lie about how little sex they’ve had.

Good fiction is a good lie, and it’s even better if the lie tells the truth.

We live at the end of pipelines of lies. They’re on TV. They’re on the internet. They come in the mail and over the phone. They’re dressed in the folderol of ads, packaging, junk mail, lawn signs, memes, sermons, soundbites, biases, platitudes, stereotypes. We usually know they’re lies. And the liars know we know they’re lying.

But without lies, what’s left? Sometimes they’re all that hold us together. No less than Napoleon said, “History is a set of lies agreed upon.”

Candidates try to pull us together with cherry-picked half-truths in the guise of patriotism, accusation and hope. We know they’re lies, so we vote for the liars whose lies we like, the lies that bespeak the way we wish life was. We hope the lies are gift-wrapped packages containing kernels of truth. And sometimes they are.

Lies come in so many packages and with so many intents and varying values that we have a taxonomy for them. To name a few…

The noble lie, told for the greater good but not without benefit to the liar.

The honest lie, really just a mistake without intent to deceive.

The white lie, harmless, told when the truth would hurt.

The blue lie, told by police to ensure conviction of the accused.

The big lie, so audacious that it seems beyond the scope of credibility.

The bluff, a tactic to gain advantage.

The defamatory lie, targeted on harming a reputation.

The half-truth lie, especially effective because it uses a fact to deceive.

The trade lie, a natural part of advertising, public relations, sales, politics, and other sad professions.

The jocular lie, the truth in an untrue jest, the tall tale, the deception of irony.

The fantasy lie, sometimes shared, sometimes kept to ourselves, in either case functional only if credible.

The lie of silence, the implied acceptance of a lie as truth.

We all live lies, like lies, need lies, and deal with lies. But lies are trouble. They require a commitment of memory and imagination. They are indulgence that leads to suffering. Once revealed, they call all subsequent truth to question.

And they eventually fall apart. You can fool some of the people some of the time, and facts can be denied, but not for long. Tangled webs unweave. Truth necessarily prevails.

The only question is, does it prevail in time?

Glenn Alan Cheney is a writer, translator, and managing editor of New London Librarium. He can be reached at glenn@nllibrarium.com.