history poll

[walkitout]

Since I've been awful cranky lately, I've decided I should do a little reality checking of myself.
Maybe I'm the only person who grew up complaining to her father that his "five years ago" had
to be at least 10 and probably more like 20 years ago, when he was repeating a hoary old chestnut
for about the millionth time. So when I say history, think, any statement made about a past
event, whether it's in a fish story, or an essay about technology.

[Poll #1180947]

Comments

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Really I needed tickyboxes, because I rely mostly on my brain but sometimes fact-check elsewhere.

good to know!

[walkitout]

And that makes perfect sense, too.

[volkhvoi.livejournal.com]

I trained as a historian, so maybe my perspective is scewed. So, question 1 (other), I generally know if someone is blowing smoke, and if I am not sure, I will check. People's knowledge about past events is generally fairly superficial (unless it is something they have made some effort to read up on), and their knowledge of context even more so.

As to your father; maybe it doesn't seem so long ago to him, so he compresses the time line. I was horrified the other day to realise I've owned the same summer hat for nearly 20 years, which I bought in (I think) my first year of college. College *can't* have been that long ago, it just *can't*!!! I'm not that old, I swear!!!

[ethelmay.livejournal.com]

Surely it depends totally on the situation, whom you're talking to, whether it would be rude to correct them, etc.? It also matters a lot whether I have street cred on the subject at hand (e.g., I am hesitant to correct my brothers about engineering or something, though occasionally I've caught them in blunders even there, whereas if it came to Victorian literature, I'd wring 'em out and hang 'em up and they'd say thank you). Under most circumstances, the only thing I can readily do is rack my brains, though depending on the subject, I'm also quite likely to ask my husband (whom I think of as knowing everything about the kind of thing I don't usually know -- the two of us make a demon team at Trivial Pursuit, lemme tell you).

When I'm dealing with people online, it's so easy to go and Google stuff that I do a lot of fact-checking.

This is the kind of poll I can never answer with anything except "It depends" -- just as I do on the polls that are supposed to decide my Myers-Briggs type or whether I might be on the autistic spectrum.