People of the cave
The noble verse was spoken by the People of the Cave—those youths who steadfastly adhered to the Oneness of Almighty God in the face of a people who had taken deities besides Him. They clearly declared their stance: ﴿We will never invoke any deity other than Him﴾, and then they highlighted the gravity of what they would have fallen into had they done so: ﴿We would have certainly spoken an outrageous statement.﴾
"Ash-shatat" (outrageousness) implies distance and exceeding the limit. In other words: "If we were to invoke another god alongside Almighty God, we would have uttered a statement that is extremely far from the truth and has far exceeded the bounds of correctness."
The expression is remarkably eloquent; it is as if they are saying: "If we were to take a god other than Almighty God, our words would not merely be a mistake, but a statement that has strayed drastically far from the truth and crossed its limits."
The root of the word shatatan is shatata, and the core meaning of this root in Arabic points to distance and exceeding a limit. From this comes the expression shatta fi al-amr, meaning someone went to extremes in a matter and strayed from what is right. From the exact same meaning comes the word ash-shatt (the shore or bank): the edge of the sea, because it is its extremity and the side distant from its center.