The Springdale news., 1889-12-06
ABOUT EXAGGERATlON.
It Is Hut Little Less Than Deliberate Pre-
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 varication.
 The love of truth Is taught as matter of course to all children, but there is too much tolerance generally shown to the obscurer forms of un- truth, such as exaggeration, or its op- posite-unjust depreciation-or to the partial suppression of truth. Men and women who would not under any consideration tell q positive untruth for the purpose of deceiving will off, fend in other ways that may at times be almost as bad. They will silently permit a friend or acquaintance to be traduced without uttering the word of truth that might save his reputa- tion; they will give partial accounts of things, conveying a wrong impress sion, sometimes carelessly. sometimes maliciously. But the commOnest of fense is that Of exaggeration, or of allowing the imagination to adorn the actual facts. Sometimes this does little harm, especially among friends, who know what allowance to make on the statements made. and it is not in- frequent to find an exaggerator con- sidered rather amusing than vicious Yet there are occasions when the hab- it of exaggeration may do much mis- chief. The great storm that has just swept the Atlantic seaboard furnishes many examples of this kind. For twenty-four hours or more there was po diract nay,, .,,,,,i ioa {;an ,,,;t1, +l,r afflicted seaside resorts on the Atlantic coast. News was difficult to obtain. It came to reporters on the mainland in the shape oi rumors or in the tales told by boatmen who brought hearsay information from the coast. The widest and most ex- travagant stories were circulated be- cause they passed from mouth to mouth of persons who had acquired the pernieious habit of exaggeration They meant no harm, but they guessed that hotels and cottages would be swept away, and the next narrator said they had been swept away, and others added particulars to ornament the story. The mischief arose from the fact that there were tens of thou sands of guests at these seaside places, with tens of thousands of relatives and friends in the larger cities, all of whom were cruelty alarmed and wor- ried by stories, some Of which had no foundation in fact. When communi- cation had been opened it was found {a,fEy swept away had not been touched by the waves; that others from which the guests were said to have fled, leaving their effects behind them, had been closed for the season, and that tho whole situation bad as it was, had been grossly exaggerated. This was hot. as a rule, the fault of the re- porters, who were obliged 10 transmit the news as it reached them, but of their informants, who had never been trained to that full and complete respect for truth that forbids ex- aggeration as it forbids the grosser forms of lying. A similar tendency to exaggerate evil is shown whenever a great calamity occurs which can not for a time be reached by trained reporters. It shows that the absence of proper training in sincere respect for truth is widespread. It is a fault that should be corrected by precept and example, for the vice of eXaggeration is only less mischiev- ous than that of deliberate lying Yet so little is 1t reprobated that one form of alleged humor in current literature consists simply of outrageous exag- geration. It has the plausible excuse for its existence that being gross, no one is likely to be deceived by it, yet exaggeration in any form is liable to become mischievous and may do an incalculable amount of harm-as where false reports are spread of calamities in which thousands of peo- pie are interested. The plain rule of conduct is to respect truth so highly that no form of untruth shall be toler- ated, neither exaggeration nor depre- citation, neither the suppression of a part nor the silence which conveys a false impression. It is not an easy matter to be strictly truthful by this high standard, but no one with proper regard for his duty to himself and fel- lowmen can fail to sec that he ought i to endeavor to reach this standard and l use his best efforts to get all within l his influence to follow his example, Baltimore Sun.
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