Showing posts with label #Winter Survival. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #Winter Survival. Show all posts

Tuesday, October 30, 2018

Checking Resources by S. L. Carlson








This week I read something which made me laugh out loud. On FaceBook was a quote from C. S. Lewis about politics, along with the reference. In the comments was something like, “He never wrote this. Check out (this Internet source) for what he actually wrote.”

What I found amusing was, why not send people to the original source? Pointing people to a secondary source certainly isn’t as accurate as reading it as it was originally printed, you know, like in that thing called a book. The quote was allegedly from The Screwtape Letters—a hysterical book on its own.

To me, sending people to a secondary source reminded me of the old game of Telephone, where kids sit in a circle. One person whispers a phrase in the next person’s ear. They keep whispering the phrase around the circle. The outcome is usually nothing like the original, and everyone falls over laughing. Why do the children burst into laughter? Because even if they didn’t know the original phrase or sentence, they know the words spoken out loud by the end of the circle could not have been anything like what the starter had said.

Would that we were as wise as children. And doesn’t this make you want to sit down with friends and play a whispering game ending in laughter?

Writers, as much as you can, instead of clicking for information on Google, please check out the original sources. Also, go find things to laugh about.

I unashamedly admit I checked online for research of the research for children laughing an average of three hundred times a day while adults laugh an average of 10 to find two interesting facts. 1) “Both adults and children laugh primarily during social interactions with others.”1  So, go interact. And, 2) the 300 times a day for children vs 10 for adults is an urban myth, although that may have come after a game of Telephone.



Lewis, C. S., The Screwtape Letters, HarperSanFrancisco, 1942

1  https://www.aath.org/do-children-laugh-much-more-often-than-adults-do

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