Nobody loves a trivia tidbit more than I do. I pride myself on being a vacuum of useless knowledge. That’s why I find Herb Reich’s book Don’t You Believe It!: Exposing the Myths Behind 250 Commonly Believed Fallacies both exhilarating and depressing at the same time. It is a dilemma. Because as much I love boring people with obscure information, I like for my unusual facts to be accurate.
I like believing that…
- P.T. Barnum said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
- Doubleday invented baseball.
- Cleopatra was Egyptian.
- Charles Lindberg was the first man to fly across the Atlantic.
- Betsy Ross sewed the first American flag.
I even like believing George Washington said, “I cannot tell a lie,” when he admitted chopping down a cherry tree, but I would be wrong on all counts. Washington didn’t even wear wooden false teeth. I haven’t been this disillusioned since the time I found out Paul Revere wasn’t the only one making that famous ride announcing, “The British are coming! The British are coming!” William Dawes and Samuel Prescott were there, too.
How does so much misinformation get circulated? As much as I would like to blame the Internet, most of these misconceptions took root long before modern technology. Blame old wives’ tales, myths, legends, hucksters, or a skewed view of an historic event. Most historians don’t intend to deceive. They, like us, tend to view happenings from their/our perspectives. Add to that some faulty memories, and presto – you have a flawed trivia tidbit to be taught in schools, cited in newspapers, and passed down for generations to come.
In the case of Paul Revere I can’t help but think he gets all the credit because of Longfellow’s poem “Listen my children and you shall hear of the midnight ride of Paul Revere.” It’s easier to rhyme “Revere” than “Prescott.”
Not only do people have some historic misconceptions, but they have some Biblical ones as well. Many believe the Bible tells us that the fruit Adam and Eve ate was an apple, all the animals that entered the ark came two by two, only three wise men visited the Christ child, Mary Magdalene was a prostitute, and money is the root of all evil. They, too, would be wrong.
I guess the only comfort I have with my modern trivia turmoil is my outdated, useless information will still let me win at Trivial Pursuit. That is, until they update the game with the truth! I doubt that will happen anytime soon. It takes years, even centuries to spread misconceptions – and much, much more time to correct them!
