butler lie

plural butler lies

1. A polite lie told in a text, on the phone, or through a similar electronic medium that provides an excuse for why one is unavailable.

   He's lying, but it's a polite lie. A butler lie.

   2017, Cassandra Parkin, The Winter's Child

   2 more examples

   By indicating that a contact has read a message, this feature may affect response time expectations and also makes it more difficult to tell a butler lie excusing late reply to a message (eg, “sorry; just saw your message”).

   2011 March, Lindsay Reynolds, Samantha Gillette, Jason Marder, Zachary Miles, Pavel Vodenski, Ariella Weintraub, Jeremy P Birnholtz, Jeffrey T Hancock, “Contact stratification and deception: blackberry messenger versus SMS use among students”, in Proceedings of the ACM 2011 conference on Computer supported cooperative work

   Thus, if we want to end a mediated communication we may tell a butler lie like 'someone has just knocked at the door', or if we do not want to meet someone at a suggested time we may say we cannot because we 'have an assignment to finish'.

   2016, Owen Hargie, Skilled Interpersonal Communication, page 245