to hide under a false appearance
Merriam-Webster
I went looking for this word the other day. I was trying to express the desire to voice complete agreement when what I really felt was agreement with some minor variant of what was being said. A purist might call that a lie, as the Merriam-Webster article I found the word defined in does. But saying lie means dissemble is to erase the subtlety of the word.
Well, I’ll put it on, and I will dissemble myself in’t; and I would I were the first that ever dissembled in such a gown.
Twelfth Night
To dissemble is to disguise. You dissemble every time you say I’m fine when asked the perfunctory “how are you?” that passes for greetings everywhere in the English speaking world. You don’t take the time to express every ache and pain that a truthful response to the query would require. The questioner doesn’t want that and would consider that kind of oversharing to be rude.
So you dissemble. Is that lying? Only if everything is black and white.
I said dissimilate first. But I knew that wasn’t right. So I looked it up. The definition seemed so close to what I heard when I heard dissemble in my head. If you had been assimilated then you could dissimilate and not be a part of that group any more. If you dissembled your previous assimilation, pretending you never had to dissimilate, you might be concealing something, but would anyone ever know? Having never known, would it make any difference? I could say I don’t care, but that would be dissembling, and I wouldn’t want to fib.
