I mean, have you seen the crazy stuff that gets passed around in email these days? And not just in email. Bloggers pick up these things. Politicians pick up these things. Even the news media, to their shame, repeat some of this stuff.
And in many cases, all it would take is a quick check of Snopes.com to determine the truth. But no matter how often I point that out, the crazy keeps coming (though not to me, often enough, which is one advantage of replying to those emails!).
At any rate, I get the Snopes.com newsletter, so I might pick out an occasional piece of misinformation to highlight here. Today, let's look at cabbages:
Pythagorean theorem: 24 words
The Lord's Prayer: 66 words
Archimedes' Principle: 67 words
The Ten Commandments: 179 words
The Gettysburg Address: 286 words
The Declaration of Independence: 1,300 words
The US government regulations on the sale of cabbage: 26,911 words
The wordy cabbage memo is often held up as a telling illustration of needless verbosity and prime example of the sort of pointless government spending everyone is in favor of seeing cut from the bone. It's a shame such an archetype is naught but pure invention, yet it appears it was never anything other than the product of someone's fertile imagination.
Versions of the showcased list have been around for at least a half a century, with earlier ones decrying a memo by the government of France specifying the price of duck eggs, a British one referring to "shell eggs," and an American one (from 1953) about fresh fruits. While not all accounts agree on the precise number of words used in the various religious and patriotic texts pointed to as effective models of brevity, the 26,911 words expended in the cabbage tome eerily remains almost constant. [Funny, huh?]
In 1977, Mobil Oil was fooled by this thing — it vectored the legend in its "Pipeline Pete" print advertisement as a bit of revealed truth. Mobil had found the item in a house organ published the year earlier by FMC Corporation, an agricultural concern in Chicago. That version went back to yet another publication that had found it printed on a card someone was carrying in his wallet.
A 1987 book (Pearls of Wisdom: A Book of Aphorisms) claimed an "EEC [European Economic Community] directive on the import of caramel and caramel products requires, apparently, no fewer than 26,911 words." Once again, someone was so charmed by a bit of authoritative-sounding apocrypha that he chose to pass it along as revealed truth. ...
(We note that a U.S. Dept. of Agriculture document from 1945 which details "Standards for the Grades of Cabbage" falls about 26,000 words short of being a 27,000-word memo.)
Funny, isn't it? But this fits the meme that many people believe, and which many politicians want to spread, that of hopelessly incompetent government bureaucrats and the over-regulation stifling business in America. The fact that it's not true,... well, who really cares about the truth?
The fact is, there's plenty of incompetence in government, just as there is everywhere else, too. With a little effort, these people could probably find examples that were real. Apparently, that's too much effort. But is it too much effort for the rest of us just to make a quick check at Snopes.com?
Or just do a search on Google. You'll find plenty of websites which repeat that misinformation - without attribution - but you'll also find plenty of places which express doubt about it. At the very least, you might realize there's reason not to just forward that anonymous email to everyone in your address book!
PS. While looking around, I stumbled across this and thought it was pretty funny:
If a bureaucratic document is one that takes tens of thousands of words to describe how to do something in stultifying detail, here’s my revision of the document, taking out the fake cabbage claim and putting in reference to a document with which most of us are familiar:
All you Need to Know about Bureaucracy:
* Pythagorean theorem:………………………………………..24 words.* Lord’s prayer:…………………….…..……………………….66 words.* Archimedes’ Principle:………………………………………67 words.* 10 Commandments:……………………………………….179 words.* Gettysburg address:……………………………………… 286 words.* Declaration of Independence :…………………….1,300 words.* US Constitution with all 27 Amendments:…..7,818 words.* God’s Biblical instructions for building a place of worship and making sacrifices:…............. 18,672 words.
SORT OF PUTS THINGS INTO PROPER PERSPECTIVE, DOESN’T IT?????
Sources: King James Bible,
Exodus 23:14-19… 161 words
Exodus 25:1 to Exodus 31:11… 6201 words
Exodus 35:4 to Exodus 40:30… 4872 words
Leviticus 1:1 to Leviticus 10:15… 7438 words
(Note that I didn't fact check that. I just thought it was funny.)
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