The Butler lie is a recent nomenclature coined by researchers at Cornell University. It's a smaller lie which is conveyed electronically and used to end a conversation. The next time your friend texts that he has to end the conversation with you because the waiter arrived, just maybe your friend isn't even at a restaurant.

Yet technology is already laying siege to the butler lie. Services like BlackBerry Messenger enable mutual users to track when their texts are read, effectively torpedoing the ''sorry, phone died last night'' excuse. ''Friend tracking'' applications like Google Latitude allow people to geographically pinpoint their friends' mobile phones. So much for ''stuck in traffic'' when you really overslept.

We refer to these types of lies, in which deception is used to manage the entry and exit of social interactions, as butler lies…. Butler lies include the strategies of using deception to "avoid interaction" and to "take leave of interaction" described by Camden [9]. We use the term "butler lies" to allude to the social buffering function that butlers provided for their employers.