Do you remember the game Telephone from when you were a kid? You know the one I mean where there is a line of, say, ten kids. The first kid makes up something to whisper in the second kid’s ear like, “Susie spilled pink lemonade.” The second kid whispers this in the third kid’s ear, and so on down the line. It always ends up, somehow, that by the time the tenth kid hears it, the original statement has morphed into something like, “Stupid people drink gasoline.”
The game is often used to illustrate to kids how rumors get started. If you are hearing something secondhand or more, you can’t really trust it to be true. This is also why hearsay is not allowed in a court of law.
Captain can play this game all by himself and have the same result, sheet you knot! What I say, what he hears, and what he repeats are three different things!
F’rinstance, I can make a casual, off-hand comment, “I’m going to your mom’s after work to help her order photo reprints online.” I go through my day thinking nothing of it, but when I get to his mom’s house after work, I find her in a state of nerves because Captain told her, “Jude is tired of helping you with your computer stuff.” And he told her this because when I said I was doing this, he heard “Your mom is helpless and expects me to fix things for her.”
I ask you, friends, how does ONE person get from point A to point C on that???
Before you think that I’m being overly critical of Captain--which has been known to happen--this is not a one-off deal. It’s habitual enough that Young Man and Molly are loathe to give him a message for me; they’ll come to me directly.
This whole rumor/gossip thing is pertinent because we have, at various points in our life, been a hot topic on the grapevine. I’m here to testify that finding yourself in that position is not pleasant.
However, sometimes misconstrued or misrepresented information can be humorous.
You remember we met Big Brother, and his wife, Annie, for dinner and drinks during our weekend in Stillwater. This resulted in a hangover on my part, which I promptly relayed to Annie via text. Lo and behold, the text I got back said I wasn’t alone in my misery; she’d suffered ill-effects as well. We both got a chuckle out of it.
Later in the day, during the course of a separate conversation with Baby Brother’s wife, Mae, I joked about Annie’s and my experience. Mae decided to do some teasing about it and texted Annie: “So I hear you got so plastered when you were out with the Brogans that you threw up at the restaurant and got kicked out!”
Now, Annie’s sense of humor is a good match for Mae’s, so the response to this good-natured ribbing was, “Nooooooo! This is how rumors spread! All I did was kick over a bar table, punch the waiter, stole the veil off the bachelorette party girl, and THEN they kicked me out. But I did NOT throw up at the bar...no way.”
I ask you, how lucky am I to have two such fun-spirited ladies as my sisters?! The fact that no one threw up just adds to my illustration that rumors, misinformation,and gossip all spread like wildfire even when there is no basis in fact. And, sadly, sometimes the misinformation is perpetuated not in good humor and fun like Mae and Annie did. No, more often, it is done out of spite and a general mean-spirited nature.
I’ll close with something I remember reading in young adult book series. The girl who was the center of the story told a fib about someone. The fib took on a life of its own and ended up damaging the reputation of the person she’d fibbed about.
Her mother came to her with a dandelion that was all fluff, and she told her daughter to blow the fluff into the wind. Once the fluff was floating away to all corners of the earth, the mother told her daughter, “Now go gather up all the fluff and bring it back.”
Obviously, this was an impossible task, which the daughter pointed out. The mother told her daughter, “Lies are like the dandelion fluff. Once it is spread, you can’t get it back. So don’t spread it in the first place.”
I realize there are whole TV stations/shows dedicated to gossip, innuendo, and speculation. However, as a civilized society, I challenge us to dedicate ourselves to being harbingers of truth instead.
On that note, I will close with a quote from Mark Twain. “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”
Images used:
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