A tweet soliciting the biggest lies people heard from other kids while growing up turns up some whoppers, like the boy who claimed his great-great-great-great grandfather was Elvis. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Whopping Lies Kids Tell”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. One of the things that we do with language, of course, is lie.
And I was thinking about this because of a great tweet recently where someone said,
Okay, tell me about the kid you knew as a kid who lied a lot. And all these people weighed in.
And it was really funny. Like the person who said that one kid said,
My great, great, great, great grandfather was Elvis. This was said in the 90s.
Okay, sure.
Clearly the kid couldn’t do math very well.
Or another kid at school claimed his turtle, Tommy the Turtle, regularly left his shell to play.
I mean, it’s really interesting to think about kids as they start to use language and they start to get a sense of what they can and can’t get away with.
And the lines between fiction and nonfiction aren’t necessarily clear.
They maybe don’t have the customs and the manners that adults have when it comes to what’s a permissible lie and what’s an impermissible lie.
Yeah, they don’t realize what’s preposterous.
Like, you know, my dad’s a dentist who files Stephen Tyler’s teeth or something.
And they don’t know the rule about being over-specific.
That’s how liars get caught the most.
You could just say, one of my relatives is famous.
I think he was Elvis.
You might have gotten away with it.
Yeah, but the four greats, yeah.
Did you have some lies?
Oh, I don’t have lies quite like that, but except for the one where my brother and I.
So I grew up a twin, and in first grade, we tried to convince a girl in school that her dad worked at a gum factory,
And we wrapped up a piece of clay in a gum wrapper and gave it to her, and she bit into it, and we thought it was hilarious.
I’m sorry, Darla Watson.
I apologize this many years later.
Forty years later, I apologize.
Gosh, I just had a flashback to when Danny Bennett and I made this concoction in a bucket that involved grass from the lawn and lots of different other things that I won’t mention.
And we told this other kid in the neighborhood that it was spinach because, you know, Popeye was really big in our crowd.
And that if they ate it, they’d get muscles like Popeye.
And did they eat it?
Yes, one bite.
Oh.
Were you talking like doggy do was in there too?
Just the worst stuff in the yard.
Oh my.
Well, we know that when you were a kid, either you were the liar or you knew a kid liar.
And they told some big ones.
Share your whoppers with us.
Or email words@waywordradio.org.
