"bold-faced lie" and "bald-faced lie" are both valid expressions. The original expression is "bare-faced lie" but they're all pretty similar to each other.
Yes but only one of them makes most people who hear it think you don’t know the expression you’re trying to use. There’s no objective reason it has to be this way, but it is, and at least personally I appreciate being told when I’ve got something stuck to my back.
I don't really know why I should care what expression I'm trying to use (or what someone else is trying to use) as long as the intent is understood. If anything, people who are needlessly pedantic about the way I express things that they clearly understood are people I'm happy to get signal from so that I can minimize my need to interact with them going forward; it's much nicer to find out from something inane like this than to wait until we have a communication problem about something actually important.
bold-faced lie is just the usual English drift that was actually questioned as incorrect when it first surfaced. If a lie is bold, you don't have to suggest that the user's face is bold when doing it. You can in thirty seconds of google searching find numerous sources explaining that "bold-faced" is a malapropism.
It's the usual English drift perhaps, but "bold faced lie" has been used since the 17th century, which is also apparent from "thirty seconds of Google searching". Three hundred years is enough usage for me to count it as correct.
On a side note, "bold faced" does not mean the persons face is bold, only that it is said boldly, which implies a level of rudeness that "bald-faced" or "bare-faced" does not.
Modern references seem to align (for instance, Garner's): Bald-faced and bare-faced have slightly different connotation than bold-faced. Despite "bold-faced lie" being in somewhat common use, "bald-faced lie" is more common (over 2x according to google stats), and overwhelmingly agreed upon as the "literate" choice, unless an author intends to refer to the sort of lie that would headline an article.
> Generally, something to be avoided by people striving for clearer communication
Their communication seemed pretty clear to me. If anyone actually claims that they didn't understand what they meant but would have understood it by using the other form of the expression, I think that's a bold-faced lie.
ssh (as noted in tfa) has had pq defaults since 2022.