The Wit's Guide to Truth
Or, the gradual dazzle
The truth is, no one wants to hear it. And so the highest calling of the Great Wit is to say it so they do.
“Tell all the Truth but tell it slant”
— Emily Dickinson
The degree of the slant is up to you. One tried-and-possibly-true method is rhyme. It’s been scientifically proven that words sound more legitimate when they sound alike. The Rhyme-as-Reason effect explains why a daily banana doesn’t scare the medical community and why O.J. Simpson didn’t go to jail. To get all cognitive about it, the Keats heuristic suggests we assume beauty = truth, while the fluency heuristic means we default to easy = true.
The light verse of Ogden Nash qualifies as both elegant and simple, and the poet snuck all sorts of uncomfortable truths into his poems:
Senescence begins
And middle age ends
The day your descendants
Outnumber your friends.
Or
Time walks on and people die;
Other people, never I.
Though it must be said that his silly animal rhymes (“who wants my jellyfish / I’m not sellyfish!”) are much more popular than his reflections on death’s inevitability. As he wrote in “Reflection on a Wicked World,” “Purity/ Is obscurity.”
“Truth shines the brighter wrapped in verse.”
— Jonathan Swift
“The truth is like poetry. And most people fucking hate poetry.”
— Overheard in a Washington bar by author Michael Lewis
If it’s not your time to rhyme, just be pithy. “Memento mori” is a much more palatable thing to say than “Don’t forget that you’re gonna die,” though all available evidence suggests the two statements are equally true.
Can two opposing statements be true? It depends how big the truths are. Light is both a particle and a wave, but the dog can’t eat the homework you never did.
“The opposite of a profound truth may well be another profound truth.”
— Niels Bohr
“He led a double life. Did that make him a liar? He did not feel a liar. He was a man of two truths.”
— Iris Murdoch
Was Col. Nathan Jessup right? Did Aaron Sorkin’s first supervillain have our number when he said we couldn’t handle the truth? They call them truth bombs because more often than not, the truth bombs. Consider humanity’s reaction to the Inconvenient Truth of our time: Shrinkflation.
No, of course I mean the climate crisis. A huge chunk of us will happily cross the melting street to avoid the subject. A smaller percentage are overwhelmed by a climate grief that no number of nature baths can wash away. And a tiny vocal sliver will deny it until the melted glaciers drown their gurgling shouts. Better to refer to climate action as inflation reduction. Or, as Sarah Lazarovic does in her empowering weekly newsletter, doodle towards real solutions.
Which brings us back to Emily Dickinson: The truth has been widely available for more than a generation. Our best excuse is that no one told it to us slant.
“The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind.”
— Emily Dickinson
Quote Vote
“The very fact of our discussing these matters implies curiosity, and curiosity in its turn is insubordination in its purest form.”
— Vladimir Nabokov
Everyone talks about how democracy is in decline, but consider that this newsletter, a totalitarian state for 160 issues, has just recently become a true organ of the people. The people’s spleen, perhaps. Every week, you vote on next week’s topic, and I thank you for the writing prompt.
Eclectic Slides
I wrote about PowerPoint and the world it made for The Globe and Mail last week. One darling I didn’t kill:
In 2010, General Stanley McChrystal, commander of NATO and U.S. forces in Afghanistan, was shown a slide depicting the occupied country’s many power relationships in 13 headings, eight colours and a spaghetti tangle of more than 100 arrows.
“When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” Gen. McChrystal said then, a remark that was seized upon as proof of the Pentagon’s overreliance on PowerPoint, but that now seems like clumsy foreshadowing of the war’s outcome.
“Some problems are not bulletizable,” General H.R. McMaster told The New York Times, in one of the most inadvertently brilliant statements ever uttered by a professional soldier. With the benefit of hindsight, it seems like the general bulletized the messenger.
If you found this newsletter through that article, welcome! And if you’re in a cubicle state of mind, let me recommend this recent issue:
Speaking of…
Simple statements
Painful pith
GWQ No. 166 is the God’s Honest, unless you think God is a lie. Could God create a whopper so delectable that even She would believe it? And isn’t it true that in Canada, we call Whoppers Maltesers? And did you know that “Maltesers were originally marketed as energy balls with the target market being women looking to shed a few pounds.” Now that’s a lie. The book that started this tangent was truly called Elements of Wit: Mastering The Art of Being Interesting. If you honestly liked any of this, tap the ❤️ below.