"Origins of words" by Susie Dent, Countdown 11/09/17 (fibs white lies)

I'm going to talk about fibs and white lies today. Where does fibs come from? It's quite a cute word, really, and it's got quite a sweet origin as well. Because go back to the 1600s and you'll find a slightly whimsical word for nonsense, which was fible-fable, and that was simply a playful what we call reduplication - sounds very complicated in linguistics, but as I've mentioned so many times in Countdown, our language is full of them. Hoity-toity, namby-pamby, that sort of thing. Jingle-jangle, okey-dokey. So, fible at some point became separated from the fable, which was the main part of it, the fable being, you know, a story, and hens perhaps a lie. And fible became shortened to fib, and so we are left with the result today. But why a white lie, which is what a fib usually is? Well, that's based on our ancient Western idea of polar opposites, in which white represents good, something good and pure, and black is often represented, in popular cultures at least, as being the symbol of evil. We have white magic, for example, which is benevolent magic, so, good spell that are cast in order to bring about good things, as opposed to black magic, which is thought of as being quite malevolent. We had a White Paternoster a while ago, which was a spell, or prayer, rather, or chant, recited at night to protect against evil spirits, and children would often be tauhgt their White Paternoster. The Black Paternoster, on the other hand, was a spell recited to conjure up evil spirits or devils. Should just say, that Paternoster, which mean "our father", of course, in Latin, it was the beginings of the Lord's Prayer, that probably gave us patter, because the first patter were prayers recited incredibly quickly. So, if you think about a sales patter today, it probably goes back to Paternoster. But anyway, goes back to white lies, it's a similar sort of thing. A black lie was one with incredibly evil intent, whereas a white lie is something fairly harmless or trivial, said in order to avoid hurting someone's feelings.