Truth Goes Down The Drain

  On a slow news day in December of 1917, H.L. Mencken decided to write a tongue-in-cheek ‘history’ of the bathtub for his column in the New York Daily Mail. It was intended as a satire piece that he described as “a tissue of absurdities, all of them deliberate and most of them obvious”. The tale made the bathtub a misunderstood contrivance that was derided by critics that called it elitist and dangerous.   It was vilified, over-taxed, and banned until President Filmore put one in the White House did people began to realize they were not so bad after all.  Mencken thought the tale might amuse readers during the dreary days of World War I.

  Until people started to quote it as fact. 

   As Mencken would later right in an article explaining how the joke got out of hand, “Pretty soon I began to encounter my preposterous ‘facts’ in the writings of other men. . . . They got into learned journals. They were alluded to on the floor of Congress. They crossed the ocean and were discussed solemnly in England, and on the continent. Finally, I began to find them in standard works of reference”[1]  

   As Charles Spurgeon said, “A lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes.”

  That is why we need to be very careful in what we say. We may ‘not mean anything by it’, but that does mean those that hear it won’t take it at full value. Little lies and half-truths can become big full-time problems.  That is why we are commanded in Ephesians 4:25, “Therefore, laying aside falsehood, speak truth each one of you with his neighbor, for we are members of one another.”

  Be careful that what you say is worth repeating!

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[1] Farquhar, Michael. A Treasury of Deception (A Michael Farquhar Treasury) (pp. 46-47). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.