Calling people on social lies
Dear Miss Manners: I was recently a guest at a group camp out. While enjoying the fire after a day of outdoor fun, another guest claimed to have been a sniper with a Marine reconnaissance unit in Iraq.
His garbled, panicky answers to a few simple ballistics questions revealed this to be an outright lie, but the other guests appeared none the wiser. This spoiled the evening’s conversation for me, and I retired immediately.
In such a case, where a fellow invitee is obviously trying to hijack other men’s valor, what can the good guest do to call out the fraud without ruining the party spirits of others? It’s simple to call out someone in a public place, but what does one do in a group social gathering or a friend’s home?
Gentle Reader: You were all sitting around the campfire, and someone went creeping around trying to hijack the men’s valor?
How exactly does that work?
Never mind. Miss Manners doesn’t want to know.
She can tell you how to dampen such conversation politely, but your fellow campers already know: It is by asking questions. As long as you seem to ask them in a spirit of interest in the narrative, these questions needn’t be kept simple.
Games people play
Dear Miss Manners: I play in a seven-team basketball league at work. The other week, I brought a somewhat expensive basketball with which to practice. After our game, I saw one of the other teams using the ball to practice.
I am friendly with most of the people on that team, so I told them they could use it as long as they got it back to me. I specifically told one person to make sure it got back to me.
Of course, it never did. When I approached this person to ask where it was, she said she thought someone else had taken it to me. When I asked that person, they said the ball they brought was actually someone else’s.
Either way, the ball is gone. Am I right to be ticked off that trying to do a nice thing by lending my ball to a group of work acquaintances cost me a $35 piece of sports merchandise, or is this just plain fourth-grade playground-style silly on my part and I should just forget about it and buy a new ball? And if the former, whom do I approach—the person, the league commissioner—and what do I say?
Gentle Reader: “Make them give me back my ball”?
Miss Manners is sorry to tell you that the chances of your getting it back are slim. So after posting a sign merely asking that it be returned, she suggests that you resign yourself and resolve not to lend anything to these people again.
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