Let’s say that you lie to someone, and you do so with no shame or remorse whatsoever. From your perspective, it’s definitely, unabashedly not the truth. And you don’t feel the least bit bad about saying it. You don’t care how your untruth will affect and impact other people. In this case, is that a bald-faced lie or a bold-faced lie? Which is the correct idiom in English?
As it turns out, both bold-faced lie and bald-faced lie are acceptable. You can even say it’s a barefaced lie or a bare-faced lie if you want, and that’d still be right. Let’s dig in a little deeper.
A Bald-Faced Lie
According to most sources, the original English idiom is a barefaced lie and that goes back as far as the 1600s. At the time, at least in and around England, most men sported facial hair. To go clean-shaven was a brazen act that deviated from the cultural norm. It was audacious. By extension, a barefaced lie is brazen and shameless. It’s laid out bare with no attempt to cloak or cover it up.
By the early 1900s or so, referring to an unshaven face as “bald” rather than “bare” gained favor. This extended to the figurative use of the word too, so a barefaced lie became a bald-faced lie, retaining the same underlying meaning. Here is a falsehood, an untruth, a fictional fabrication with a brazen disregard for what other may think or how it may affect them. It’s bald, with nothing to hide or conceal.
A Bold-Faced Lie
Okay, so if a barefaced lie or a bald-faced lie started out with clean-shaven men, how do we get to a bold-faced lie? Really, it comes from the same underlying intention of an utter brashness to telling the untruth. While bald-faced lie continues to be a part of the common vernacular, a bold-faced lie entered the discussion in the late 20th century.
Whether you hyphenate it as bold-faced or smush it together as boldfaced, this is the same brazen lie with a blatant disregard for others. Instead of talking about a lack of facial hair, a bold-faced lie is a bit more direct. Here is a lie told with a face that’s bold. It’s bold in its disrespect and disregard. A “bold” person is confident and unafraid, sometimes to a fault, like when they’re lying right to your face.
While some sources indicate that a bold-faced lie could relate to word processing and how we might bold some text, I’m not as convinced. That just sounds like a bold-faced lie if you ask me.
Bald, Bold, Bare… Which Face Should I Use?
For now, with or without hyphens, all of these are technically correct: bald-faced lie, bold-faced lie, and bare-faced lie. If we consider usage over time, based on Google Ngram Viewer, bald is most common in 2021, followed by bold and then bare.
Paradoxically, if we consider the number of Google search results, the order changes dramatically. Bold-faced lie takes the lead with almost 35 million results, followed by bare-faced lie (24 million) and bald-faced lie (8 million). If you’re champing at the bit for which word to choose, there’s no easy answer.
While bare-faced has been around the longest, people use it the least today. Between the proper edited text scanned by Google Ngram and the “Wild West” of Google results, I’d place more trust in the former. So, if you’re in doubt, picking a bald-faced lie is probably the safest bet. Honest.
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