Starve the Wrongheaded Urban Legends, Feed the Truth

Paul Dickson has written numerous books about the peculiarities of the American language and American life. To give you an idea of his scope, one is called “The Mature Person’s Guide to Kites, Yo-Yos, Frisbees and Other Childlike Diversions.”

You might doubt that Dickson could put together a whole book on such a subject, but don’t worry. He did.

His newest, written with Joseph C. Goulden, is called “Myth-Informed: Legends, Credos and Wrongheaded Facts We All Believe” (Perigee Books).

Glancing through the chapters, I get the idea that almost nothing Americans believe has any basis in fact.

Some of his examples are enlightening. The term corpus delicti does not mean a dead body. It means the body of evidence in a case. Many murderers have been convicted without a corpse, but not without a corpus delicti.

Milk is good for ulcers . Not true. It irritates ulcers.

Everybody knows that you feed a cold and starve a fever. One doctor who denounced this myth said he wanted “He fed fevers” engraved on his tombstone.

It does not bother or pain a lobster to be cooked alive. That one reminds me of what Delia Gomez said when her husband, Romulo, dropped a live lobster in a pot of boiling water: “They don’t like it, you know.”

Dinosaurs were the bane of cavemen. Human beings didn’t appear until 60 million years after the last dinosaur died.

There are a number of documented cases when a clock has stopped working when its owner died. Evidently that one comes from the ballad of the grandfather clock that “stopped short, never to go again, when the old man died.”

All vodka is the same, so you may as well buy a cheap one. That’s what my wife does. Then she pours the cheap vodka into an empty Stolichnaya bottle. I wonder whom she thinks she’s fooling.

Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach. This nonsense is attributed to the great wit George Bernard Shaw, who was talking through his beard.

The Baby Ruth candy bar was named for baseball great Babe Ruth. Nope. It was named for President Grover Cleveland’s baby daughter, Ruth. Glad to know that.

Practice makes perfect. Nope. The inept piano player will still be inept after 10 years of practice.

A curve ball in baseball does not curve; it is only an optical illusion. Nope. A spinning ball curves both in practice and theory. So Vin Scully knows what he’s talking about.

Dickson also buries several of those persistent stories called “urban myths,” like the one about the friendly automobile push.

In this one, a man is driving on a freeway when his car stalls. A woman driver pulls up behind him and asks if she can help. He says, yes, she can give him a push, but he has automatic transmission so she must be going 35 miles an hour before his car will start.

The man sits in his car, waiting for the push, which seems to be a long time in coming. Then he glances in the rearview mirror and sees the woman bearing down on him--at 35 miles an hour.

It is supposed to have happened on every highway and freeway in the country, but no one has produced police records to substantiate it.

While I am quoting from Dickson’s book, I should perhaps make amends for an oversight in quoting from another book a year or two ago. That book was “The Paper Dynasty” by Ted Gardner, the Peninsula newspaper columnist.

I was writing a column about similes, good and bad, and quoted several from Gardner’s book that I thought were weird.

The reason I did not mention the author or his book is that I was making fun of his similes and did not want to publicly embarrass him. That was a mistake in judgment. I now have a plaintive letter from S. Hy Eister, Gardner’s agent, deploring that treatment.

“Fantastic publicity for book and author,” he writes, “only you neglected to mention his name or the name of the book.”

Eister said he thought of suing me, but instead he sends a copy of Gardner’s new book, “Off the Wall,” with this plea: “You could so easily atone for your past slight by inserting this book and author somewhere in your column. And the book is a collection of his journalism, so it doesn’t have those show-boat similes his last one had.”

Indeed “Off the Wall” is off the wall, bursting with Gardner’s irreverent and outrageous humor and jumping with his figures of speech, among which, forgive me, are a few similes, including “the mosquitoes were as big as baked potatoes.’

No fooling, similes and all, it’s a blast.