An ex-wife of a relative is known for inserting herself into UL. She’s also managed to take anecdotes from fiction and tell them like it happened to her. I just let it go. Anyone with half a brain knows she’s lying through her teeth, mostly because 99% of the time she opens her mouth she’s lying no matter what comes out of it. If she told me the sun rises in the east, I would wake up early the next morning to double check.
Some things you just let go. It’s not worth the agrevation. If it ever comes up again and you feel your friend would benefit by knowing the truth, then tell him, otherwise, it’s not worth it.
I work in a large city library and I hear patrons relate UL’s as fact several times a month. Sometimes they will ask about it directly, other times it will come out during the reference interview. In my position I can’t really let it slide, but I try to be as tactful as I can in bursting their bubble. I find the reaction is divided about 50/50 between relief that the awful story isn’t true and high indignation because it sure did happen to their friend.
But in some cases I will let it pass. I often work the genealogy desk and I’ve listened many a time to someone breathlessly relate an UL that supposedly happened long ago to one of their ancestors. Who am I to speak ill of the dead?
My mother actually had someone relate the “I saw Paul Newman at a cafe and put my ice cream cone in my purse as a result of staring dreamily at him” UL to her, as if it had happened to a woman that this person personally witnessed. I don’t have the link to that tale handy, but it is on Snopes. Those kinds of things I just laugh off, because in the long run they’re pretty harmless.
What I can’t stand are ULs or myths that perpetuate some falsehood or scientific impossibility, and are either potentially harmful to heed or are just plain stupid. I work in a jewelry store and we sometimes have customers who hesitate about buying opals because of all the superstitions about them - most of which I’d never even heard of. There was also a woman who was very wary about buying a necklace with a certain pseudo-religious symbol on it because she was so concerned about getting “bad vibes” from it - even after I told her that that particular symbol was multi-denominational and considered by many to be a positive symbol. Silly yarns about Paul Newman and ice cream cones are one thing, but superstitions really irritate me sometimes, particularly ones of the “old wives’ tale” variety.
Oh I don’t either, but trying to convince him it’s just an urban legend will just lower your stock when it comes time to debunk a real UL. And we need all the ignorance-fighthers out there we can get.
To answer the OP - my boss treated the group to lunch the other day, and one of the very senior people who I have to work with told the “cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey” story. Normally I’d have been all over that, but I’m fairly new and have to work with this guy, so I bit my tongue firmly through the whole ordeal.
I call people on it when they regurgitate, either via e-mail or in person, political glurge. At my last office, I heard someone repeating that crap about the snowstorm in North Dakota and how they supposedly dealt with it without whining to the Federal Government like those entitled negroes in New Orleans. I called him on that shit in a real damned hurry.
I just remembered I had another one on the same day and didn’t call her on it either. I’m such a wimp. This one was at my Weight Watchers meeting and one of the people who was celebrating a five pound loss said that her current trick was eating a lot of “negative calorie foods” from a list that she found on the internet. If you google you can find a number of lists, followed by the Snopes article saying sorry it ain’t so. I was kind of surprised that the leader didn’t correct her, but, in the long run nobody is going to be hurt by eating any of those foods. They are all the sorts of things you should be eating a lot of anyway.