Alicornutopia

He is not planning to mess with time, and did hear evidence indicating that Rose Thorburn may have been having effects on his immediate environment, suggesting she could be nearby...?

Lying is a spectrum.

“Being more honest means you stock up more goodwill with the universe and any others you meet. Borderline dishonesty is useful, lying by omission is better yet, and unvarnished honesty is better still. I can’t quite interpret it, but perhaps you were joking? Sarcasm?”

(Blake, earlier: "Just say the names three times? That isn't ominous at all.")

“So… what? I lose my power?”
“You lose some. And a mere ghost gains more influence over you, even through a circle, or when bound into an object. It’ll take at least a week to wear off. Luckily, there aren’t many things in this house to hear, hm?”
“I’d kind of expected a… clap of thunder?”
“Barring the exceptional moments of idiocy, such as the breaking of an oath, you typically only discover what you’ve done when you reach for power and find it gone.”


Sadde mostly only said words that were literally true, so he's more or less at "lying by omission." Not the best habit, but everyone does it and there won't be a noticeable effect from doing it once in a while.

The only sense in which Sadde knows anything about where she is is that he hasn't heard anything about where she is and she has had time to reach him if she chose to. And while he's heard people say things that suggest a diabolist is around, nothing particularly pointed to her. If he said "Something suggested she might be hereabouts" or "Someone left me a message and I thought it seemed like her", that would be honest, but "Someone suggested she might be hereabouts" would not be.

Maybe I just consider "I heard <x>" a much stronger statement than you do. I'd consider "I heard <x>" to mean "Someone told me something, and <x> is an honest rephrasing or summary of what they told me.", not "Someone told me something, and what they told me made me think that <x>.". I'd consider saying it and meaning the latter, like Sadde is doing here, to be somewhere between borderline dishonesty and an out-and-out lie, depending on context. And in context it's deliberately concealing the evidence that made him think that and implying that he got a different, more direct evidentiary path.

He did hear it, though. Right as he said it, from his own mouth.

Alternately, he “heard” it from his internal monologue, six replies earlier.

Those are stretching the truth a bit farther than lying by omission, though, I agree.

When I say "I heard X", I generally mean anywhere on the continuum from "Someone told me something, and X is an honest rephrasing of what they said" through "I have a vague memory of having encountered an assertion of X, but I can't remember where or in what context" to "I have a vague memory of having encountered evidence for X, but I can't call to mind exactly what the evidence was or where I encountered it". Toward the latter end I'll more often phrase it "I heard somewhere", but the "somewhere" isn't strictly necessary.

If I were in Sadde's position I'd make sure to have said "Rose might be here" out loud to myself, just to preserve the literal truth of "I've heard." Assuming Sadde doesn't talk to himself, he might end up with a temporary downgrade from that.

(Alternatively, he didn't say "I just heard she might be," he said the 1943 equivalent idiom and we translation convention-ed it inaccurately.)

Has he been in 1943 long enough to pick up on that sort of idiom?

Yeah we just elided over that time in Jacob's Bell.

I'm not aure how I feel about Scott being in Slytherin. Like yay Slytherin, but then I go ?????? He kind if seems Hufflepuff-ish to me.

Maybe I should read the first thread though, since I started on "improper use of magic office".

Yeah there is Context to this.