Word: rumoring
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SILLY as this imaginary news dispatch may seem, it is not much sillier than the rumor, currently sweeping U.S. college campuses, that Paul McCartney is dead. As with most rumors, no one really knows its source. It has been variously traced to a thesis by an Ohio Wesleyan University student, a satirical but deadpan story in the Oct. 14 issue of the University of Michigan Daily, and a Detroit disk jockey who spread much the same nonsense over radio station WKNR. Since the rumor spread, Beatle fans have diligently parsed the albums of their heroes for clues corroborating what they...
...McCartney proved by appearing at a Glasgow airport last week, he is indisputably alive. But so is the baseless report that he is not. What is more, the rumor is not likely to die before he does; after the event, which could occur 50 or so years from now, the last surviving mongers of this particular rumor will triumphantly crow: "I told you so." For reasons that go back to the origins of man, the human intellect craves to discover more meaning than facts can supply. What it does not know it will guess at. Airborne by ignorance and insecurity...
...conditions are essential to the survival of a rumor. One is ambiguity, which can stem from many different sources: a shortage of dependable information, events beyond ordinary understanding. The other condition is man's dislike of ambiguity in situations that vitally affect...
...which not only events but their meaning strain human understanding. Merely to live with the omnipotence of science and technology is enough to send man back to the safe harbor of primitive myth. Just as myth was the predecessor of science and religion, so may rumor have been the precursor of myth. Long before man registered his thoughts on the pages of history, he committed his anxieties and his faith to rumor-that welcome channel of information and misinformation that made sense of senselessness...
...satisfying the human need for reassurance, rumor plays a role that truth not always can. It goes through three distinct stages. In the first, the fact content is reduced, partly because of the porosity of human memory, partly because of man's inclination to simplify. The Great Blackout of 1965 was a cause of countless rumors; some people immediately assumed that it was the result of a Communist sabotage plot; others believed that it was an unannounced air-raid test by the U.S. Government. In the next stage, the rumormonger accents certain parts of the story that appeal...