The Internet’s rife with urban rumors. (Because, after all, the Internet isn’t just the information superhighway; it’s also the bullsh!t highway. The highway doesn’t care what sort of traffic it carries as long as every bit of it pays the proper toll.)
But this post isn’t about Internet-based urban legends. It’s about offline word-of-mouth urban legends.
I suspect I’m not alone in my certainty that many of these have influenced my understanding of the universe, of people, of life. And I may have lots of company, too, in having no idea what portion of it might actually be true, as opposed to simply fun, convenient, or dangerous — and little intention (or time) to check it all out.
In the rest of this post I thought I’d try a little experiment. What follows are three urban legends, two “true” (in the sense that “a guy I know once really DID tell me”), and one made up just for this post. Furthermore, I won’t tell you which are the real ones and which, the impostor.
(One interesting possibility: that someone, somewhere, will (a) find this post via a search on a keyword which figures prominently in the bogus urban legend, (b) do a “find” within the post itself, looking for the keyword and hence skipping over all this background, and eventually (c) spread the false rumor as his/her own bit of “a guy once told me” folklore. Ah, posterity…)
Here goes:
