Antidote to Factoids

By Stephan Kanfer

THE DICTIONARY OF MISINFORMATION by TOM BURNAM 302 pages. Thomas Y. Crowell. $9.95.

Marie Antoinette never said, "Let them eat cake."

Sherlock Holmes never said, "Elementary, my dear Watson."

Lizzie Borden was acquitted.

Delilah did not cut Samson's hair.

The Emancipation Proclamation did not free any slaves.

Prohibition never forbade the drinking of liquor.

Statements like these are usually made by the windbag at the end of the bar, the one who ends by losing the bets and buying the drinks. But in each of the above cases the loudmouth would be on the receiving end of the drinks.

The Emancipation Proclamation, for example, applied only to the Confederate States. They were at war with the Union and ignored both the spirit and letter of the law. Delilah, according to Judges 16:19, made Samson "sleep upon her knees; and she called for a man and she caused him to shave off the seven locks ..." Nothing in the 18th Amendment prohibited the consumption of liquor, only its manufacture, sale or transportation. As for the cake eating, it was the haughty Duchess of Tuscany who made the remark circa 1760.

It is time some iconoclast gave the lie to what Norman Mailer calls "factoids"--falsities long accepted as valid.

The truth seeker is Tom Burnam, an English professor at Portland State University in Oregon, and his compendium is the best antidote to nonsense since H.L. Mencken hung up his spites. "I believe," says Burnam in his introduction to The Dictionary of Misinformation, "that when we fall it's not because our reasoning faculties have tripped us; it's because of the things we know that just aren't so."

So that we may never trip again, Burnam reminds us that:

The guillotine is not French and was not named for its inventor. (The several-hundred-year-old device was merely advocated by Dr. Joseph Guillotin, who opposed the prevalent methods of torture and execution. After the Terror, Guillotin's family changed its name.)

Owls can see and hunt in the daytime; foxes are dumb and gorillas are timorous.

The baseball was livelier in Babe Ruth's day than in Carlton Fisk's.

There is, unhappily, no such thing as a real aphrodisiac. (Spanish fly, the most notorious amatory device, in fact causes diarrhea, vomiting, great pain and depression.)

The Dictionary of Misinformation is in the tradition of Mencken's American Credo, a mocking collage of secular gospel. Examples:

The accumulation of great wealth always brings with it great unhappiness.

One feels very humble and insignificant when looking at the Grand Canyon.

The '20s gadfly was stung in turn by Robert Benchley's parody of factual anthologies, Did You Know That-- Ice is really a vegetable organism which forms on the surface of water to prevent it from freezing solid?

Frederick the Great once gave a walking stick to Voltaire, which bent double every time he leaned his weight on it, which was the reason that Voltaire was such a cynic?

If Burnam is more utilitarian than American Credo and is barely winged by Benchley, it is because his compendium contains more truth and less malice than its predecessors. The Dictionary of Misinformation misleads only once --in its title. Information is all that the volume contains: enough to keep the canny reader collecting bar bets for the rest of the year. Stefan Kanfer

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