Do you swear to tell the truth?  The whole truth?  And nothing but the truth?

Sometimes we try. But there are circumstances when glitches get in the way.  Glitches like Hearsay.

Yep.  Hearsay.  Now this is one of those things that have an incredible tendency to irritate me.  I do not like hearsay one bit.  I always try to dispel  it whenever possible.

As Webster explains…  hearsay is “information received from other people that one cannot adequately substantiate.  A Rumor.”

And there you have it.  Hearsay.  Rumor.  You know how that goes.  Something is said by someone.  And then……  people either don’t hear it right, or like to exaggerate, or they simply aren’t very good at regurgitating the details which were presented to them .  This thing becomes a circulating story of uncertain or doubtful truth.

Let us just put an example out there.  Suppose… last Tuesday… I said to the lady at the Deli… “I used to have an orange cat.  His name was Bud.”   By Thursday… the story runs along these lines:   “I heard Polly has a huge tiger that they keep in the barn out at their place.  They got it when it was a little orange colored cub and they paid a bunch of money for that that thing.  Now it weighs 900 pounds and it lives in one of the horse stalls. It ate their little dog, Buddy, on Tuesday.”

The little fleck of snow starts at the top of the hill, and by the time it rolls to the bottom, it is a boulder-sized snow ball.   An avalanche.

Sometimes… it has good basis.  Take the Hedge Apple.  Mostly, these things are just landscape nuisances.  Wildlife, such as birds, and deer, and such…..  won’t eat them because they taste nasty.

And then the hearsay.  People have made persistently big claims about putting Hedge apples indoors, to ward off insects.  But. ….  a few years ago, Iowa State University toxicologists extracted compounds from hedge apples. When highly concentrated, these compounds were, in fact, found to repel insects.  High concentrations.

But those scientists also found that NATURAL concentrations of these compounds in the fruit were too low to be an effective repellent. So, don’t be fooled into spending much money, time, or energy….  to use hedge apples as an insect repellent.

Truthfully, I am a pretty trusting person.  So when someone gives me information, which they say is credible, I believe them.    But I am learning that seeing is believing. Or is it?

These days… even that isn’t fail safe.  Photos can be shopped.  Audio recordings can be duped.   So what do you do?  Sometimes it can be difficult to know what is true, and what is not.  Especially when you think the source is reputable.    But I guess there is at least one way to slow this down.  Perhaps. Just because you “hear” it…. doesn’t mean you have to “say” it to anyone else.

All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them. —  Galileo Galilei