Pete, oddly enough, "terminological inexactitude" was the only
Churchill entry in the 1941 first edition of the Oxford Dictionary of
Quotations; their number has increased somewhat since....

But the term has been misinterpreted over the years. Churchill coined
it not to describe an untruth, but what some MPs had dubbed "Chinese
Slavery"--the employment of Chinese at low wages in the Transvaal. In
my quotations book "Churchill By Himself" I added this comment by
Randolph Churchill:

"This celebrated example of polysyllabic humour was always to be
misunderstood and to be regarded as a nice substitute
for 'lie', which it plainly was not intended to be."

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