Hello, everyone!
We have been having a bit of a debate on [r/German](https://www.reddit.com/r/German/) about proverbs and sayings (actually had it a couple days ago now, but since I’m new on here, reddit wouldn’t let me post this any sooner; I’m still interested to know, though, so I’ll still appreciate any answer I get) and this one – “Lies/A lie have no legs.” – happened to be mentioned, in OP’s post itself as well as the comments. It seems to be a phrase that is common among many different languages, we have found, and I got curious about its origins.
Then, after doing a cursory search on Google, I stumbled upon a couple sites that claimed it may have come from this “Japanese proverb” that is supposed to roughly translate to: “A lie has no legs, but scandalous wings”; however, no actual Japanese version was provided.
It also seems to be somewhat disputed since, as other sites stated, there may have been a guy by the name of Thomas Fuller that said it first (or at least a slightly altered form, “\[…\], but scandal has wings.”) and somehow inspired this supposed “Japanese proverb”.
Tl;dr – **my question** here **is** simply, ***if this saying does*** indeed ***exist in Japanese***, **what would it be** (in Japanese)?
Of course, I will only appreciate it should you expand on the topic and maybe also let me/us know to what extent it’s still used or, if there’s any information on this in Japanese, whether it being where the phrase stemmed from could be true.
Anyway, if you got this far – thank you so much for taking time out of your day to read and/or answer my question; it’s very much appreciated. May you have a nice day! 🙂
Note: I was doubtful whether it was right to post my question here or perhaps if it would be better to ask on [r/askjapan](https://www.reddit.com/r/askjapan/) or [r/AskAJapanese](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskAJapanese/), so I hope I chose the right subreddit in the end. Also, I can’t decide if this falls under the ‘Quick/short questions that could be addressed by a single answer’ that should go to the pinned daily question thread or not. In case it turns out I was wrong to post here, let me know and I will move it there.
Edit: I just realized I should probably share the post on r/German that I’m talking about, so [here](https://www.reddit.com/r/German/comments/w9pwrc/german_phrases_that_shouldnt_be_translated/) it is. This particular proverb is mentioned as last in the op’s post.
1 comment
My initial researching (in Japanese) is actually finding the German saying even though I’m not looking for the German one. I think it’s probably not Japanese because the “lies have no legs” part relies on another idiom which is “to have legs to stand on”, and I find it really hard to believe that two languages so different (Japanese and English) could so easily share a saying containing another idiom.
I found this: 嘘には足がない。だがスキャンダルは翼を持っている。(Lies have no legs, but scandals have wings). All mentions of this do come back to Thomas Fuller it seems, and it’s pretty clear from the language of this “saying” that it’s at least not an old Japanese proverb because スキャンダル is a word borrowed from English. I can’t find an etymology for the word that includes when it was first borrowed into Japanese, but…it’ll be relatively recently in the grand scheme of things.