What does this line mean: "What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive"
“We make a mess of things when we start lying.”
It’s written in an older English style. Essentially it’s just the first one you’ve mentioned.
The ‘first’ in the second half of the phrase isn’t relevant in current times but would have been common to include in sayings like this - it’s more noting that you have the intention of lying, not that you’ve found yourself doing so off the cuff.
It’s like this: “if you are going out there to lie about something, this is going to go to shit”. Rather than, “this is going to shit because it’s the first time you’re lying”, that’s a far too literal take on older English.
And for any non-native English speakers - ‘practice’ is the act of doing something, as opposed to ‘practise’ being learning/mastering through repetition.
Its talking about spiderman's secret identity
It's a little bit of both, imo.
The original poem implies that in context.
And, in general usage, it's done as both of them.
It's also true that lies snowball and become harder to keep track of. It is also true that inexperienced liars tend to weave over complicated lies thinking that it makes them more believable. So an inexperienced liar is going to start out complicated, ending up with a series of lies that are impossible to keep straight.
You ever spend time around a kid that's going through that phase of lying about everything, even stuff there's no need or use in lying? It's always convoluted and they'll end up contradicting themselves, sometimes in the same lie.
The poem pretty much shows that idea perfectly. Well, iirc it does, I haven't read in a long fucking time lol
There's this whole scene in Dune: Prophecy about how we as humans have to expend extra effort to be able to lie, how it doesn't come naturally and the body resists in different ways.
I think that's what the line is saying...
If you lie, you have to consistently repeat that story to keep up the lie. This usually involves smaller lies to pad the bigger lie with so it blends in with truth. This is like a web, where all stories are connected and each must be upheld for the main big lie to be believable.
Someone who doesn’t have years of experience in lying and its consequences won’t know that each subsequent lie now needs to be upheld, so things get messy.
My dad told me about this saying when I was kid. He was in the Amazon with my mom when she was researching spiders…right before she died.
I think it's the first one. A lie starts small but can quickly grow out of control. It's from the poem "Marmion: A Tale of Flodden Field" which is about a man romantically pursuing a woman by making up lies about her current fiancé and ultimately results in all their lives being changed for the worst.