"Not gonna lie"

Kase Wickman, "Kylie Kelce Knocked Joe Rogan Off the Top Podcast Slot, In Just One Episode", Vanity Fair 12/10/2024:

Kylie Kelce, wife of Jason Kelce, sister-in-law of Travis Kelce, mother of three (with a fourth on the way), and Dunkin Donuts enthusiast, can add another descriptor to that incomplete list: No. 1 podcast host.

The debut of Kylie’s new podcast, Not Gonna Lie, has unseated Joe Rogan’s The Joe Rogan Experience from its long-held perch atop the most-listened charts on both Apple and Spotify. The inaugural episode, featuring It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia star Kaitlin Olson as a guest, was published on December 5, with new episodes planned to drop each Thursday.

Not Gonna Lie retains the top spots in its second week — here's what the (top of the) Apple list looks like this morning:

"Not gonna lie", at least in that spelling, seems to be a relatively recent addition to the list of English discourse markers:

Though it's got a ways to go to catch up to "tell you the truth":

And both of them are still far behind "honestly", at least in the published books that Google NGrams monitors:

Obviously the Google Books NGram hits for all three searches will include many non-discourse-marker uses, but I think they probably capture the general trend in frequency of usage. A similar historical difference is implied by the fact that "tell you the truth" has a Wiktionary page, while "not gonna lie" is still without one.

Beating out Joe Rogan is a pretty big deal, politically as well as culturally. But the main linguistic point here is the evolution of the title phrase's meaning and use.

In general, increased frequency of use correlates with semantic bleaching (see e.g. "Memetic dynamics of summative cliches", 9/26/2009; or "So", 12/26/2019) — in the cases under discussion, the implied contrast with explicit untruth gradually fades, letting some other pragmatically-associated meaning(s) become stronger.

The Wiktionary entry for "honestly" glosses its Interjection use as "Used to express exasperation, dismay, etc.", with the example "Honestly! I want to finish this work and you keep interrupting."

In the case of "not gonna lie", what's left seems to be mainly a sense of gossipy friendliness, associated with some information that might have been omitted in a less intimate setting. The opening of Kylie Kelce's inaugural podcast:

And similarly the second week's opening: