Today marked I think the official 400th time I’ve heard the “true story” by a person whose friend worked in a hospital where illiterate parents called their baby “Fee-molly” due to the “female” wrist bracelet the hospital gives all newborn girls. This one is so old it’s been on Designing Women and you invariably know where this true story is headed as soon as they get to the part about hillbilly or illiterate parents, besides which I don’t think I’ve ever seen a baby girl with a “female” wrist bracelet.
A closely related but distant second to this is the number of people who swear that they or their sibling or their friend went to school with black twins named Orangello and Lemonjello (pronounced or-RON-jih-lo and lay-MON-jih-lo but inspired by orange-jello and lemon-jello).
Third-up would probably be all of the stuff Jane Fonda allegedly did while in North Vietnam: betraying messages secreted to her by U.S. PoWs, calling them babykillers, and basically stopping just short of gunning down a couple of U.S. aircrafts and personally torturing John McCain. While she did really go to North Vietnam during the war/conflict of course, and she really has never apologized for it [just a sort of ‘unpology’ acknowledgement that she said some things she shouldn’t have], her treacherous actions have been wildly blown out of proportion and debunked a thousand times even by U.S. P.o.W.s who met her while she was there. (I should add though that one reason I heard these repeated so often was that I used to go to the National P.O.W. Museum when I lived near Andersonville, Georgia, and it was usually being repeated by people in the Vietnam section.)
So which ones (of these or others altogether) are you officially sick of hearing? (I don’t even bother to correct them anymore usually- let them have their fun… “Feh-molly… those crazy hillbillies! Check please…”)
In keeping with the Fe-molly story, there’s the one about the ghetto black kids named Lemonjello (leh-MON-juh-LO) and Orangejello (uh-RON-juh-LO). You know, because their mom saw boxes of Jell-O mix and thought they would make cute names. :rolleyes:
Continuing on the theme, there’s the Shithead (pronounce “shuh-TAYD” or similar) naming story. My friend’s mom, who works as a nurse, told me that one, too, that it happened in her hospital. I didn’t have the heart to tell her I didn’t believe her and that I heard that story a dozen times before that.
OMG, honey, I just read about how they hide under your car at the gas station because it’s a gang initiation to take a finger from the flower of white womanhood!
It would be a tie between the surprise party/dog/peanut butter story, the “found dog” at the beach that turned out to be a rat, and the Eddie Murphy (or other famous black actor) in the casino elevator story.
I haven’t heard it in years (knock on wood), but for a quite a while I was fully prepared to drive to the lake and rent a houseboat just so I could keelhaul the next person who talked about Neiman Marcus and the motherfreakin’ chocolate chip cookies.
Telling them it wasn’t true didn’t convince them. Showing them cites that it wasn’t true didn’t convince them. In one case, I actually called Neiman Marcus, put them on speakerphone, and had the nice lady confirm that they’d never even had chocolate chip cookies before the email started going around, only to be met with “Well, of course they’d say that NOW.”
Shut up about the cookies! There are no cookies! There were never any cookies! The cookies are lies! AAAAAAARRRRRRGGGGGGGGGH!!! :mad:
These days, when I’m in a social setting with someone I think is likely to tell one of these, I try to keep an ear out and just pre-empt them.
“Yeah, when I was growin’ up, there were these two kids I went to high school with, they were twins, and their parents were from one o’ the bad neighborhoods y’see, and…”
“Orange and lemon jello.”
“…um…”
At that point, they usually shut up and just sit there looking dumbfounded, at which point I’ll change the subject if no one else does. It may not be nice, but I don’t care. If you’re going to be a lying grandstander, at least put in the effort to make up your own lies.
Just about every “fun facts” list I see in those folded advertising sheets placed in restaurants includes the one about a duck’s quack not echoing, and it always says, “and nobody knows why.”
The one I still hear quite often is about people collecting the pop-tops from aluminum soda cans to help someone pay for dialysis or surgery or something.
I think I’m fortunate in that I don’t hear many ULs in the wild. Maybe because I keep to myself. So, I don’t know which one I’ve heard the most often. But the most egregious recent example I have was my professor in a “Managing Across Cultures” class in a freakin’ graduate program repeated the oldie-but-goodie that the Chevy Nova sold poorly in Spanish-speaking countries because Nova ~“doesn’t go”. Dumbass.
