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A new book looks at how and why people lie, cheat and steal. An article in Time magazine looks at what the author found: “Most people are able to cheat a little because they can maintain the sense of themselves as basically honest people. They won’t commit major fraud on their tax returns or insurance claims or expense reports, but they’ll cut corners or exaggerate here or there because they don’t feel that bad about it.”

Read more: http://business.time.com/2012/06/18/why-almost-all-of-us-cheat-and-steal/?xid=newsletter-weekly#ixzz1zc3AKCZ3

My mom read The Honest Truth About Dishonesty: How We Lie to Everyone---Especially Ourselves and found it fascinating.

As we are busy blaming “BP” for messing up the Gulf of mexico I would suggest a solution for oil barriers along the beautiful beaches there and in fact all along our coastlines. First I will direct you to search floating “debris in the gulf of Mexico”.

There are enough objects floating there that if gathered and strung along the beaches could cover all the coastlines of our country I believe. It is floating so we would not have to buy new floating barriers, all we need is nets, which could be made from shredding more of the junk out in the ocean. “BP” didn’t put it there, it came from the cities along the waterways that feed into the gulf.

Though much of it is oil byproducts washed out from storm drains, a lot came from the “Beautiful” beaches and those “Valuable tourists” that are so afraid of getting a tar ball on their tootsies visited and left behind. They should come back and volunteer to help clean it if they really care!

I also propose instead of dredging sand that will destroy animal habitat we build berms of the garbage that came from those beaches in the first place. It may be ugly, to say the least, but it would do more for the fish and birds in the region that get trapped in it than any other thing I can think of, just cover it with a small portion of sand from the tourist beaches.

The wild life doesn’t want it and it’s only fare that the people that made it take it back and recycle it or something. They need to pay for every bit of the pollution just like “BP”, all of us who let that junk float out to sea should pay for it to be cleaned up!

If an honest look at what is in the ocean was taken “BP” would look like small potatoes or in this case oil  byproduct pollution.

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When I married my wife I made her an honest woman.

Does that mean she was dishonest before?

Usually these days people think of an honest person as one who doesn’t lie or cheat on their expense claims but when the word honest came into the language 700 years ago it had a slightly different meaning.

Someone who was honest was someone who held an honorable position.

This is the meaning honest brought with it from French where it had appeared a thousand years ago from Latin.

Suddenly the phrase “make an honest woman of her” makes sense, she is entering the honorable state of marriage.

The “honorable” meaning has now gone out of the word honest but in Shakespeare’s time both meanings were in use, and although he doesn’t use the phrase with respect to marriage, he does use the term “honest woman” several times and with both the “honorable” and “not-dishonest” meanings.

It was thirteen years after Shakespeare’s death in 1616 that the “to make an honest woman of” phrase first appeared in literature.

Another more recent phrase is “honest injun”—as schoolboys might say when swearing that they aren’t exaggerating about something.

This usage dates first from Mark Twain’s Tom Sawyer in 1876.  Sources differ in their speculation on where this phrase came from.

Certainly injun means a “North American Indian” but while the Oxford English Dictionary thinks the phrase refers to secure promises made by Indians, Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable says early settlers referred to themselves as honest injuns in contrast to the dishonesty they felt the Indians displayed.

Finally, Hugh Rawson in his book Wicked Words feels the phrase used to be used derisively, meaning someone who was an honest injun wasn’t honest at all.